Skycircus

by Peter Bunzl

  That afternoon, Robert and the rest of the circus crew returned to the hard work of raising the Big Top. A crisp wind blew across the site. Over the top of the spiked fence and gate, Robert could make out the crowns of the trees in the Bois de Boulogne. The glimpse of their crinkled leaves shaking somehow gave him hope as he fell into line with Silva and Dimitri and the rest of the crew, who were hauling on pulleys to raise the canvas roof.

  The red-and-white striped canvas undulated in the breeze, pulling him and everyone else from side to side as if it were engaged in a monstrous tug of war against them.

  “Keep the line taut,” Silva warned Robert, leaning into him as the rope ran through his fingers. The roustabouts to each side of him kept giving him horrible disapproving glances. “If our side doesn’t raise straight there’ll be trouble.”

  Robert gripped the rope tighter, yanking it length by length along with Silva, until his knuckles whitened and the fibres burned sharp against his fingers, and it felt as if all the energy had been sucked from his body.

  Finally the roof was raised.

  “TIE HER OFF!” Slimwood shouted from the far side of the tent and everyone rushed to knot their length of guy rope on to the nearest stake.

  After that there were side poles to add beneath the floating roof, more guys to tighten and the long strips of walling that had to be sewn together and wrapped around the sides of the tent. Robert looked for the section of canvas he’d cut through yesterday with his knife, but he couldn’t see it. Someone had repaired it already.

  As he followed Dimitri and Silva around learning each job he made sure to glance about for Lily and Malkin. But there was no sign of them or any of the other hybrids from Room Thirteen. Other times, he checked to see if the cargo-bay door was open, so he could find his clothes and things. It never was. And he was unsure what he could do about either of those problems without using up his last chance and bringing more trouble down on himself.

  The final job of the day, once the tent was up, was adding the banners and bunting to decorate it. While everyone was busy with this, the gates in the fence opened and a long black steam-wagon pulled through and parked just a few feet from the edge of the tent where Robert was standing.

  Joey, in a scruffy suit, jumped down from the steering compartment, and closed and locked the gates behind him, as Auggie ran around the edge of the tent to meet him.

  “Where d’you get that weam-stagon?” Auggie called.

  Joey said something indistinguishable in reply. Robert stopped what he was doing, looked around to check he wasn’t being watched, and stole a little closer to them so he could overhear the rest of what they were saying. While he listened, he kept behind the curve of the tent wall, out of their sight line.

  Auggie was pointing at the steam-wagon. “It looks like a hearse.”

  “It is,” Joey said. “Madame’s bought some new device for the evening show on Sunday. To put Miss Hartman in – or Miss Valentine, I should say! They’ve added her to the posters. Made her look quite pretty. They’re arriving later, and we’re to go into Paris to plaster ’em around the city.”

  “Pore mointless errands!” Auggie complained. “And what’s dis thevice?” he asked. “I mean, what’s this device?”

  “I’m not a boffin,” Joey said. “But I think it’s some kind of electric coffin.”

  Robert tensed, his pulse throbbing in his chest. He had to keep his head. He tried hard not to let this news fester and listened instead to the rest of what was being discussed.

  “The doctor who’s making it’s not quite done.” Joey slapped the roof of the parked steam-hearse. “But we’re to collect it tomorrow in this, and Madame will come.”

  So that was their scheme! They were going to put Lily in some coffin-machine and display her in their show. On Sunday night – which was only two days away! He needed to tell her as soon as possible. Their escape plan had to be ready to go before those two days were out. Otherwise, whatever terrible fate Slimwood and Verdigris had lined up for Lily might come to pass, and that didn’t bear thinking about.

  Robert crept back to Dimitri and Silva, who were hooking up the last roll of bunting.

  “There,” Dimitri said, tying it off. “Done and dusted.”

  The light was fading fast. The whistle blew for dinner.

  As they lined up with the rest of the crew to go in for the night, Robert told Silva and Dimitri what he’d overheard the clowns saying.

  “It doesn’t sound good for your friend!” Silva said softly.

  “We have to get a message to her right now!” Robert wiped his clammy hands on his work clothes. The queue had started to shuffle in through the side door of the sky-ship. “We can sneak off when we go inside.”

  Silva shook her head. “They’ll see us, and you’ve only one strike left. Besides you won’t be able to get to their door – there’s a padlocked gate in the way.”

  The first of the circus folk had reached the door hatch and were being counted into the gondola by Slimwood, who ticked them off on a numbered list.

  Soon they were at the front of the line and bundled inside along with everyone else, up the stairs to the mess hall, and it was too late to come up with any kind of plan.

  At dinner, Robert sat at table six with Dimitri and the Buttons once again. The meal was more gruel. He could barely keep it down. He kept coming back to the mysterious fate that awaited Lily in the show in two days’ time. He needed to get a message to her about it as soon as possible and he’d no idea how.

  Just as Robert was thinking this, a red shape streaked from the shadows of the doorway to under their table, and a moment later a snouty face appeared between his legs. “Malkin!” Robert whispered in delight, his heart soaring with relief at the sight of his old friend. He tried not to make it obvious to those around him that he was looking down. He threw a quick glance at them, but they were too busy chatting amongst themselves.

  Only Silva noticed. “Who are you talking to?” she asked.

  “No one,” Robert blustered, but she had felt the fox brush against her leg under the table, and when she peered down, she saw him. If she was shocked to spy a talking fox under the dinner table it didn’t show in her poker face. “Don’t worry,” she said, “I’ll keep your secret, just raise your head like you’re talking to me, then no one will notice.”

  Robert nodded. With his eyes on Silva, he tried to converse with Malkin under the table, aiming his words down. It was more difficult than it looked.

  “How did you get out?” he asked the fox softly.

  “Lily managed to open a hatch in the door of Room Thirteen,” Malkin explained.

  “How is Lily?” Robert asked, through the side of his mouth.

  “Moaning about everything, as usual.”

  Robert was relieved to hear one of the fox’s barbed comments for once. He couldn’t resist a peek at him. Malkin’s toothy smile widened into a lopsided grin.

  “Look at me,” Silva told him again. “You need to be quick now.”

  She was right. The Lunk was patrolling the room, and at any moment he might register what was going on. In whispered murmurs, Robert told Malkin about the conversation he’d overheard between Auggie and Joey, and how Madame was planning to put Lily into some sort of coffin-like machine made by a doctor that was being delivered tomorrow night.

  “That doesn’t give us much time,” Malkin said in a hushed voice. “We have to try and get out tonight. Lily needs the lock picks. You’ll have to give them to me.”

  Robert gave a dry gulp at the back of his throat. “I can’t. They’re lost.”

  “What?” That one word was shaded with disappointment. “Did Slimwood take them?” Malkin asked.

  “No.” Robert bit his lip. “They’re in my other clothes in a laundry bag in the cargo bay.”

  “Then I can get them,” Malkin said.

  Robert shook his head. “You won’t be able to. They locked all the doors for the night when they brought everyone in from puttin
g up the tent.”

  “Oh.” Malkin’s whiskers drooped in despair.

  “But don’t worry,” Robert added. “I’ll get the picks back tomorrow. Silva and Dimitri will help me.”

  Silva nodded. “Tell Lily we’ll find them for her,” she said.

  “When? How?” Malkin asked.

  “We don’t know yet,” Robert said. “But we’ll think of something.”

  Everyone had finished eating by this time and a whistle rang out.

  “You’d better scarper,” Silva whispered to the fox, “Before the Lunk starts taking people to the cell corridor and you won’t be able to get back.”

  “Good luck,” Robert muttered. He watched as Malkin disappeared under the table and sneaked out of the mess hall while no one was looking. He hoped the mech-fox would get back to Room Thirteen okay. He imagined Lily would be disappointed when she got his message and no lock picks. He’d need to get them for her tomorrow, because time was running out. He wondered if Tolly had got back home to John and explained what had happened to them. But there wouldn’t be time to wait for rescue now – not since things had begun to move so fast. No, he, Lily and Malkin would have to escape from this place by tomorrow night, and that wasn’t going to be easy, even if he managed to recover the lock picks.

  When he looked up again he saw that theirs was the last table of circus folk left in the room. There were solely roustabouts in the canteen now. They all leered at him. And it was only then that he realized he’d no idea where he was going to sleep.

  “Don’t let them put me in with anyone bad,” he mumbled to Silva and Dimitri.

  “That’s all right,” Silva said. “You can come with us, we have space in cabin six. When the Lunk comes to get us, just follow along.”

  Robert felt relieved to have found a friendly family in this horrible place. It made him remember his ma and sister, who’d given him the Moonlocket that Slimwood had taken. They were show people too, and just like the Buttons, they were kind folk who had become lost in a bad place for a while.

  The Lunk had returned to collect them. Robert did as Silva suggested, standing up with the Button family and Dimitri, and losing himself in the middle of the group as they were marched from the mess hall.

  Robert tried hard to remember the way as the Lunk led the family down the stairwell and along a passage of cabins to somewhere deep within the sky-ship.

  Finally the mechanical man opened Room Six and the Buttons and Dimitri stepped inside. Robert was the last in and with a CLUUUNNnnkk! the Lunk slammed the door behind him and locked it.

  As soon as he was gone, the Buttons busied themselves getting ready for bed.

  There were only four berths in the room, and each one was taken already, but Dimitri went to a trunk in the corner and pulled out a hammock for Robert, and the rest of the family helped him string it across the centre of the cabin.

  When they were finished, he climbed up into the hammock and settled himself on his back. Its dusty sides gathered in around him, holding him tight in its grip. Every time he shifted, it would rock back and forth ever so slightly. It felt strange, but not uncomfortable, like being the pendulum of a clock, or lying in a cradle floating on the ocean.

  He listened to the sleep sounds the Buttons made – Bruno Buttons’s snores and Gilda Buttons’s wheezing – and wondered if Lily had found a proper bed, with a proper pillow. Most of all he hoped Malkin would get his message to her. Tomorrow, he, Robert, would find the lock picks and the three of them would make a plan to get out of this terrible place before it was too late. He’d need his wits about him for that, so he should probably try to get some rest. He closed his eyes and his breathing softened as he gradually drifted off into strange and troubled dreams.

  In the dark narrow confines of her bunk in Room Thirteen, Lily had spent an uncomfortable night wide awake. Her scarf was wound round her neck and Malkin was wound down around her feet. But her thoughts itched, and so did her scars as she thought of all she’d learned that evening while she and the hybrids had waited anxiously for the fox’s return.

  It had been an uncomfortable few hours, hoping upon hope that Malkin would not get caught and would eventually make it back. So, partly to pass the time, partly to assuage their nerves and mostly because Lily had given them her story, each of the hybrids had told Lily the terrible tale of their past.

  Luca had gone first. His parents had died when he was thirteen and he’d lost his hands in an accident working in a factory. After that he was sent to a children’s home in Manchester where he never went out or spoke to anyone. Then, one day, a doctor came and spirited him away, brought him to Paris, and made his iron claws… That doctor had turned out to be Droz. Lily had shuddered to hear the name again, and Luca had trailed off after that, as if he didn’t want to relive the rest of what had happened to him. Finally he finished with, “After it was all over I was sold to the circus.”

  Deedee spoke next, telling of how she was born in a painted wagon to a family of wire-walking show people. She had no legs from birth and when her folks realized that she mightn’t be able to carry on their profession, they were distraught. “They didn’t want me to end up in a freakshow in some down-at-heel carnival, gawped at by penny punters,” she explained. “But the midwife who delivered me had heard tell of a place in Paris where I might be able to walk with the aid of mechanical prosthetics. The doctor there would pay to use me in experiments. They said it would make me ‘better’.” The rest she didn’t want to talk about. Except to say that her parents had died in a circus accident and she’d never got to go home. “Eventually,” she said, “I too was sold to the Skycircus.” Then she put her head in her hands and sobbed.

  Lily shuddered at the thought of the terrible things that had happened to her.

  Finally it had been Angelique’s turn. She’d leaned back on her bunk and slowly folded her arms around her knees, wrapping her wings around her body to block herself off from the others.

  She’d told how her father had been an airman from Freetown in Sierra Leone on the coast of West Africa. “He always wanted to travel,” she explained, “and one day he got a job as a cabin boy on a zep that was heading to England.”

  In London he had met Angelique’s ma, who was a chambermaid in a fancy hotel, and they’d fallen in love and got married. They were overjoyed when Angelique’s ma had fallen pregnant, but they didn’t have much money, so her father had found a commission on another airship where he could earn enough for his growing family. He was a crewman on the Atlantic zep Hawksmoth, flying from London to Alaska, but on the maiden voyage they were lost in a storm and he never returned. Angelique’s mother had died in the Camden Workhouse years later, when Angelique was nine. She survived them both, but her bones were brittle. Hollow in the middle, lighter than air. She’d broken her leg twice while she lived in the workhouse, and when she was sixteen, Droz had found her in the attic there, and brought her to Paris. Then the experiments lasted a year, before Angelique got her wings and was sold to the circus.

  “It took me many months in rehearsals to learn how to use these extra limbs,” Angelique continued, picking at her feathers with frustration. Lily could see she found speaking about it uncomfortable. “It wasn’t a natural process, becoming a bird – it wasn’t engrained in my being, like with fledglings. I had to practise every day before I learned to glide and swoop. To fly strains every muscle in a body.”

  She shook her plumage angrily. “People were not meant to live like this, Lily. Airships and zeppelins are one thing, but flying humans should never have made their way into the world. To fly is a dream, but sometimes, when you achieve your dreams, you discover nothing can stop you from falling.”

  “I wish I’d never met Droz,” Deedee said sadly, when Angelique had finished.

  “Me too,” Angelique answered.

  Lily had been about to say something then. To tell them of her mama’s connection with Droz, when, at that moment Malkin had scrabbled at the base of the door.


  They hurried to let him back in through the hatch, and he revealed the bad news. How Robert had lost the lock picks and how the clowns were bringing Madame’s coffin-machine tomorrow evening – whatever it was – and Lily was to be put into it for the show.

  Thinking back on it now, Lily felt nauseous, not just for her own fate, but because before she’d met Angelique, she’d never once considered that to have wings, or any of their adjustments, might be an unpleasant affliction. Yet the way Angelique spoke about them made them sound like a curse.

  It was, Lily reflected, how she felt about her heart. Some days her scars ached and the heart felt so heavy it seemed as if it might fall through her ribcage. She had to will herself through those times and know that her heart was what kept her alive and brought her moments of joy too. Maybe Angelique had lost that sense of her wings. It had become tangled up in the terrible things that had happened to her.

  She was glad, in that moment, that she hadn’t told the whole truth. She’d left out the small fact that her mama had known Droz and that the doctor’s interest was something to do with why Madame had taken her in the first place.

  How would Angelique feel if she knew Lily’s own mother could have provided part of the research that helped make the wings which caused her so much pain? Would she still want to help Lily escape then? That question made Lily’s chest tighten.

  Angelique, Luca and Deedee had lost so much; they’d been prisoners nearly all their lives. But now she had earned their trust and she needed to honour it. Lily glanced at Malkin, who’d wound down at her feet, and thought of Robert locked up somewhere on the ship too. And she decided, no matter what, she was going to get them all out. She had no idea exactly what terrible fate Madame had planned for her with her machine, but she really couldn’t afford to wait around and find out. She hoped that Robert could get the picks to her tomorrow. Even with them, escaping was still going to be tough and she’d need the hybrids’ help to get out.

  She sat up and took the ripped pages of Mama’s notebook from her pocket, and flicked through them, squinting in the low, electric light of the room in an attempt to read. She hoped she would find something to set her mind at rest and feel better, or that at least might aid her plans.