Circus of Wonders

by Elizabeth Macneal

  ‘Yes,’ Toby said. ‘I tripped. A mistake.’ He didn’t know, though; he didn’t know what really happened, what the truth was.

  For the first time, it occurs to him that Dash was just one man among thousands who were killed in the war, their slaughter legitimized by the simple equation of where a man was born. Russian, English, French, Turkish. Another dead soldier was not a story worth investigating. And yet, he believed this was different, that the puzzle of Dash’s death sat at the heart of his life, that it would undo him. In every book he has read, crimes build towards moments of revelation, of discovery and punishment. He has exhausted himself with fearing it; has allowed it to shape his life in innumerable ways. But what if Dash’s death meant nothing, if that time of reckoning never arrives?

  He stumbles forwards, tripping over split beams and ropes and overturned benches. The wet horse-blanket steams in his hands, his eyes stinging.

  ‘Jasper?’ he calls. He folds over in a fit of coughing. ‘Jasper?’

  A breeze twists through the tent, and in the second before the flames rage with even more fury, there is a break in the smoke.

  His brother is standing in the middle of the ring. His arms are cast upwards, as if this is all part of the show. Toby pushes towards him, flames searing his shins, his shoes useless, hot ash frying the pads of his feet. Oil has spilt into the grass and the ground is on fire. Sawdust lit like kindling. Pain as sharp as an axe. It is so dark, the smoke so thick. He coughs into the blanket, stumbles on debris.

  ‘Jasper,’ he whispers.

  We’re brothers, linked together.

  Something crashes behind them. One of the king poles buckling. The fabric swings down. Toby screams, shields his face from a curtain of hot sparks. He holds out his arms.

  ‘Jasper,’ he tries to say, but his throat is too dry.

  Love swells in him, bucks at the nails of his chest. His brother. His brother. Their lives are small echoes of each other’s. Home and Sevastopol and the show; a lifetime of shared stories, their feet propped on crates as they smoked pipes and drank gin and laughed.

  A sudden lance of pain; he cowers, his eyes creased. Just two more steps and he will be there, beside his brother. He reaches for him. Heat. But Jasper moves back, and suddenly Toby realizes why he is still here, what he is planning to do. His brother is poised, ready to throw himself into the fire. Toby tries to speak, but his voice is lost, his throat choked with smoke.

  ‘Leave – me,’ Jasper says.

  Toby can do nothing but watch as his brother reaches out his arm to the tent wall. Jasper does not break eye contact, his mouth in a small smile as if to say, You cannot stop me. His hand, reaching forwards, his body about to follow, a man on the brink of annihilation – and then Jasper flinches, darts his hand back, nurses it. Horror on his face, an understanding of what pain means, of what he cannot bring himself to do. His mouth is crumpled and he begins to keen, to low like an animal.

  Toby reaches for his arm, seizes him in a clumsy embrace. It is easy, then, to still Jasper, to roll him in the blanket.

  Who would you choose?

  He knows the answer, as he lifts Jasper on to his back as easily as a beam, as he hunkers low to the ground and lumbers through burning benches and pools of melted tallow. His brother’s heart beats against his own, a half of him.

  Nell

  Nell strains, thrashes in Stella’s grip.

  ‘Let me go,’ she shouts, again and again.

  The great body of the tent swings down, crashes to its knees. A ripping sound, as if the sky is being torn in two. Screams tear her throat, her hands turned to claws. Sparks billow like fireflies.

  ‘Toby,’ she cries, and even Stella loosens her hold for an instant. But Nell finds she has no fight left. Her arms slump to her sides. Peggy takes her hand, grips it. Her friend does not speak, does not try to find words to console her.

  But a great cheer is rippling through the crowd. A man blocks her view. She beats forwards. ‘What is it?’

  Stella and Peggy lift her, and she sees Toby ambling forwards, a weight on his back. Her hand covers her mouth. He keels over, a hunched figure placed on the ground, curled like a child in prayer.

  Applause, cheering, as if this is the finale they have all been expecting – as if a man in a glittering red topper might ride out on an elephant and bellow, Encore!

  Figures descend, blanketing Toby, concealing him from view. They wrap the body in cloth and sling it on a horse.

  ‘Is he dead?’ Stella asks quietly. Nell is surprised by the sadness in her voice. ‘Is Jasper dead?’

  ‘I can’t see.’

  There is a bellowing for water, for the crowds to move aside so the dray can pass through. She thinks of Charlie, those empty early days without him, how she would wake in the night and expect to find him there. That glimpse she had of him just before Jasper snatched her away, his forehead bent to Mary’s. She is weighed down with all she has lost, all she has had taken from her. The silence between them when Charlie visited, her life changed from what he knew. But still, for all that, she has always had the power to make choices of her own.

  When Stella takes her hand, Nell does not resist. Together, they weave through hundreds of people, cheeks orange with reflected fire. Her friend barters with a man with a cart, nods at Nell. She lifts Pearl on to it.

  ‘Horses,’ the child says.

  The cart moves slowly through the crowds. Pearl snuffles against her, whimpers as the horses move, cries for her lost mouse. Peggy lies against the wood, her eyes black and fearful. They turn down streets lined with rickety houses, down lanes with darkened hedgerows. The bright sphere of light dwindles to nothing.

  Stella hands Nell a bottle of ale and a cloth, and she sponges the speckled burns on the child’s arms.

  ‘Where are we going?’ Pearl asks.

  Ahead, it is dark. No lights, no houses. It is a blank future on which she might inscribe anything.

  Epilogue

  And let there be

  Beautiful things made new.

  JOHN KEATS, The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream, an epic poem which was unfinished on Keats’s death in 1821

  It is a damp Wednesday afternoon when Toby sets off on the road to Oxford. He carries a flask of water, two powdered-beef sandwiches and a leather purse. He walks with a slight limp, the leathery burn on his thigh tightening with every step. It is a humid day and sweat gathers at the back of his neck. He rolls up his sleeves. His tattoos have smudged over time, flowers blending into each other, pinks turned to purple. The green apple looks more like a bruise.

  He walks past yellow fields of oilseed rape, ramshackle cottages, farmers herding their cows with sticks. He sits by a river and scoops more water into his flask and drinks thirstily, then sets off again. In his pocket, there is a faded handbill. ‘The Flying Sisters’.

  It is his charwoman, Jane, who brings him news of passing tenting shows. She has given him the handbills of Astley’s and Hengler’s, Winston’s and Sanger’s, and the big American circuses that Jasper once dreaded. Toby has read his brother the advertisements and watched his face for a flicker of joy or resentment or sadness. Nothing. He has continued to draw and mutter, barely raising his head.

  All of these troupes have passed within a whisker of their cottage. As Toby has sat by the hearth, boiling potatoes and mashing turnips, he sometimes swore he could hear them riding past. The roaring of a lion. An elephant, distressed. Perhaps Minnie was among them. Perhaps she was dead. He closed his eyes and imagined their bright coaches and caged beasts and sequinned performers, all passing the towering oak by the turnpike, bouncing over that pothole he always keeps topped up with gravel.

  And then, one afternoon, Jane pressed a new leaflet into his hand. ‘All women in this one. All women!’ She sniffed her disapproval. ‘A very dignified life, I’m sure, flaunting themselves.’

  Toby thanked her and crumpled the paper into his pocket without a thought. But a few days later, when Jasper was sleeping, he went fo
r a walk. The crab apples in the churchyard were ripe, branches bent with their weight, and he scrumped a few. He moved to put them in his jacket and found the balled handbill. He opened it.

  It felt as though someone had punched his insides out of him.

  There she was, in the centre, as steady as a flame.

  ‘The Flying Sisters!’

  She looked the same, as if time had not touched her. Golden hair loose on her shoulders. As beautiful as she ever was. Her legs, bare and dappled. He had kissed every inch of them. And there was Stella, perched on a trapeze, Peggy juggling, and other women he did not know. A pale girl with white hair dressed in a doublet, mice tiptoeing down her arms – he smiled. Pearl.

  It was quite simple; he thought of Nell all the time. He thought of her when he peeled vegetables for his brother, and when he walked out to the river in the mornings and saw the mists steaming like milk, and when he sat in his old pew and tried to summon prayers that would not come.

  At first, in the days and weeks and months after the fire, it had distressed him, as if something essential had been severed from him. He thought of seeking her out, abandoning his brother. But how could he? They were brothers, linked together, beating with one heart, breathing with a single pair of lungs. His penance was to stay with Jasper. They had each saved the other once, but rather than freeing Toby, it had only forged them closer. He learned merely to live with Nell as a comforting presence. They conversed constantly in his head. He often imagined a chance encounter, an acknowledgement that she thought of him too. That would be enough, he told himself.

  But the sight of this advertisement had jarred him, disrupted these steady thoughts. Ten years had passed, and yet she wormed her way into every alcove of his mind. He felt bilious. His heart rose in his throat, in his ears, at the thought he might go to her show and see her. Lust sickened him.

  He had to go. He asked Jane to look in on Jasper, and he packed a small cloth bag. He wore the same old jerkin, scrupulously cleaned, dyed again with woad. He would not look at himself in a mirror to see how badly he had aged.

  He keeps walking, nods at farmers and ladies and boys in ragged trousers. He can see the spires of Oxford in the distance, blue in the haze. Fat bumblebees drowse on wild poppies, legs dusty with pollen.

  Ten years have passed, he reminds himself. Ten years.

  She might have married. She might have forgotten him. Her life has moved forwards, while his has stayed in a rut. Her world will have been filled with colours and wondrous sights (‘a European tour’, he read on the handbill; ‘Paris, Berlin’, and ‘America and Moscow’. ‘Performances before royalty’), while his life has shrunk to a single cottage with a narrow dirt track. He painted the door blue. It is as he always pictured it, except without her in it. And in a way, he has been content. He has enjoyed giving himself to the service of another. He has found the extraordinary in the ordinary – the sweet scent of a dog rose, the way the light knocks the chipped table first thing in the morning. Things he would never have noticed or understood if his life were not so small. Occasionally, he catches himself looking at the world as an observer, squaring his fingers like a photograph, and he always plunges his fists into his pocket and keeps walking. He pushes his old wagon from his mind, its looping script. Secure the shadow ’ere the substance fades.

  It helps, of course, that his brother does not complain, does not criticize. ‘Look at this,’ Jasper will say each afternoon, and he will push another drawing towards Toby. Even Toby can tell that it is nothing but a mash of lines and cogs, endlessly looping. ‘It will make my name. The greatest in the world,’ he will mutter. He will grasp Toby’s hand, a pleading look in his eye. ‘You’ll send it, won’t you? You’ll send it to London.’

  ‘Yes,’ Toby will say, accepting it and tucking it into his pocket.

  Perhaps Jasper knows that Toby secretly uses them for kindling, because he never specifies an exact address or a recipient, never asks about a reply. Each drawing is forgotten about instantly, a new idea taking its place. In the evenings, they will sit by the fire and Toby will relieve his guilt by talking about their childhood, just as Jasper always liked. He will say, ‘Do you remember when we first read Frankenstein? Do you remember when you were given that microscope, when you caught me trying on your clothes? You always used to laugh when Father called us the Brothers Grimm.’ Sometimes, Toby will look up and see tears dripping from Jasper’s chin, and he will calm his brother like an infant. Remorse and grief follow quickly, until Toby cannot bear to look at Jasper and he has to busy himself with scrubbing the hearth or turning down the bed.

  Sometimes, he imagines it differently; that he’d told Nell about Dash and what he’d done. That Stella had found out. That it had boiled over into a fight, that Nell had left him because of it, that what he did to Dash had had some meaning. Dash’s death felt like casting a stone into a pond and no ripples showing.

  There, ahead, is the circus with its striped tent. The honk of trumpets, the sawing of a violin. All is chaos, laughter, entertainment. His chest constricts. He stops at the stile to regain his breath. He searches the crowd, tries to shed his limp. If anything, it seems to worsen.

  He sets his mouth and walks on.

  A girl is juggling apples, her face whitened with paste, peacock eyes painted on her cheeks. He passes the snuffbox shy. Hawkers flog baskets and tinware, girls sell tickets for the lucky-bag swindle. He notices Stella, lifting a child so that he can see the elephant. He raises his hand in greeting, but she does not see him.

  ‘Tickets, sir,’ a girl says, and he turns, and Pearl is in front of him, a topper in her hand, rattling with coins. Behind her stands a muscled woman, to guard it from thieves, no doubt. Ready to give chase if she needs to.

  ‘Pearl?’ he whispers, but she does not respond. She does not know him.

  ‘Family tickets a shilling.’

  ‘Just me,’ he says, quietly, taking out his purse and handing her the coins.

  She is grown, a woman now. She must be fifteen years old.

  He imagined, somehow, that it would be easy. That Nell would see him instantly and they would chatter. He would link his fingers through hers, run through reminiscences. But what would they talk about? His small life, her great one? He would have nothing at all to share.

  He walks towards the tent. And then, he sees her, through a gap in the fabric. She looks just the same as she always did. That mouth he has kissed.

  She clambers on to a trapeze, laughs at someone below her. Her smile is as artless as ever, but her movements are surer. He slips inside and stands at the back. The seats are not yet filled, the audience still outside. It is as hot as a forge. A horse is plucking at tufts of grass.

  She begins to flip her body. It sets the rope swinging. She has learned trapeze, then. Even Jasper would say she is skilled. She gains momentum. He recalls the old collision of their bodies, nails scratching his back, teeth biting his earlobe. He shivers.

  ‘Has someone checked the ropes?’ she calls, and then she drops backwards, hangs from her knees.

  As she flies across the tent, her hair spilling beneath her, he has an urge to stand up, to seize the reins of one of the horses, and to fly beside her. To gather the fragments of their old life and piece them back together. To leave his life as he knows it. That dripping house where they eat pottage each morning. Circus has always made him believe that anything is possible. But he knows, too, that it is an illusion, that life does not share its boldness, its neat stories.

  Because what would happen to Jasper, then? Who would care for him? Toby’s dream comes to a stuttering halt. He was wrong to think he could come here. He belongs with Jasper in that quiet cottage.

  We’re brothers, linked together.

  A sudden thought strikes him: she will not want him here.

  He should have known how these stories end. But with all his love of books, he was blind to it. For all that, he thought they were mere fantasy; that his reality would somehow be different. Edifices
burn down, and then they are regenerated. People destroy each other, are punished, transformed.

  When the tent burnt down, Nell’s life began, Jasper’s ended. And Toby – he trapped himself somewhere between the two of them.

  He frowns. Outside, he can hear laughter.

  ‘Wheezes ever charming, ever new!’

  He looks down at his old jerkin. His worn shoes, tied together with string. The blurred edge of a tattooed vine peeking out of his sleeve. He does not fit here. He never did. The purpose of his life is to give comfort, to repent. An ordinary, quiet existence. He always made a pitiful hero.

  Nell is clambering down from the trapeze. She has not seen him. And before he can change his mind, he slips away, through the gap in the tent, and then he is blinking in the bright sunshine. He will take that little road back home and forget he was ever foolish enough to visit. He will tell Jane that the show was stupendous, marvellous, incredible. He will thank her for looking after his brother, and then he will resume his usual duties. They will sit by the fire and Toby will tell Jasper stories about microscopes and clothes and gifted books.

  He gives his ticket to a child, who grins in delight, and then he limps back through the meadow, towards home. It is a narrow path, hewn at the edge of a stream.

  For the next few weeks, he knows the memory of Nell will be unbearable. He will not sleep tonight. He will pace and shred his fingernails. He will think, What if, what if, what if. But those feelings have passed before and they will pass again. Soon, her imagined presence will become comforting and he will find small but constant contentment in his life.

  Just once, when he is halfway over the stile, does he turn and look back. Crowds like milling ants around a sugar cone. The cries and shouts are audible even from here. He waits for the hush. The show is about to begin.

  Nell sits in her wagon, a cake of red face paint discarded beside her. She knows they will be looking for her, knows that the benches are full and the audience is ready. She hears the gong being beaten, summoning the last of the performers. She reaches out and touches a glass wind chime, listens to its quiet reverberations.