Despite the increased attendance at the museum, Barnum clearly still felt there was some advertising value in her staying at the hotel. If it meant one more person would buy a ticket who wouldn’t otherwise, then it would be worth it to him.
Levi walked Amelia back to the hotel that evening, as he always did. They didn’t talk, for they couldn’t risk anyone possibly seeing her speak in public, and Levi couldn’t come up to her room as he had done when he played Dr. Griffin. One of Barnum’s guards would meet her outside the hotel and escort her upstairs.
As Amelia walked, her arm tucked into Levi’s, she felt like someone’s gaze was scorching the back of her neck. She looked over her shoulder, expecting to see the staring (burning) man, or perhaps even her long-lost traveling preacher.
There were still folk about, but not as many as during the day, and they all seemed engaged in their own business. No one waited and watched.
Now you’re being fanciful, Amelia thought. Why would the man wait for her outside the museum?
Why, though, would he return hour after hour to watch her swim around the tank? Was he a religious zealot, as Levi suspected, or was he just so fascinated with her mermaid self that he would pay any amount to see her again and again?
Neither one was a comfortable choice, Amelia thought. They each meant a kind of obsession, and obsessions could be dangerous.
She leaned closer to Levi. He was warm, and she felt so very, very cold.
That night she pulled the curtains of her room a little tighter, letting not a sliver of light in. It took her many hours before she was able to sleep, for she knew that when she slept, she would dream of him, dream of his staring burning eyes and his thin hands like claws grasping for her.
The next day, the burning man returned. Barnum had kept his promise to speak to the men who watched over her (Charity had insisted upon it), and Amelia saw the two guards confer briefly when the man entered the saloon for the first time. But they were under orders from Barnum not to approach him unless he physically threatened Amelia.
And he did not threaten her. He didn’t walk near the glass, nor did he refuse to leave the saloon each time it closed. He did nothing overt, nothing that could justify the growing sense of disquiet in Amelia.
But he stayed. And he stared. And his eyes were lit by flames from within.
Levi also stayed. The former Dr. Griffin entered in the morning and took note of the man (he was easy to find if one was looking—he was the only person who did not move at all) but per Barnum’s adamant instruction did not approach the burning man.
Later, when the museum was closed, Levi admitted to Amelia that the staring man disturbed him, too.
“He doesn’t seem to blink,” Levi said. “Like a reptile. And he never takes his eyes off you, not even for a moment.”
“I don’t want him to come into the exhibit anymore,” Amelia said.
Two days of the man’s intensity had her feeling simultaneously exhausted and restless. She didn’t think she could take another day of it.
But Levi’s attempt at persuading Barnum that the man might be dangerous fell on deaf ears.
“Barnum, it’s not natural. It’s not natural the way he stands there and looks at her,” Levi said.
“You just don’t want anyone looking at her but you,” Barnum said, stirring his sugar in his coffee.
It was a mark of how distressed Levi was that he didn’t blush, or stammer, or do any of the other things that he usually did when Barnum implied that Levi was attracted to Amelia.
“You haven’t seen him,” Levi said. “There’s something very, very wrong with that man. I think he may mean Amelia harm.”
“What proof do you have of that?” Barnum asked.
“Taylor, if he’s upsetting Amelia, isn’t that enough?” Charity asked. “If she’s upset, then she might not be able to go on with the show. You might have to post signs saying that the mermaid is ill and there will be no performances.”
Ah, that was brilliant, Charity! Amelia thought.
As if she heard Amelia’s thought, Charity gave her friend a very small wink when Barnum wasn’t looking.
Barnum looked ill himself at the thought of it. “You’re not that distressed, are you? Not so much that it would make you sick?”
“He makes it difficult to perform,” Amelia admitted. “His presence is a distraction, and because I am uncomfortable it is sometimes impossible for me to eat. What if I faint under the water? What will happen then? I will have to be taken out of the tank and put to bed for the remainder of the day.”
Amelia thought this privately absurd, but it was well known that men of Barnum’s type thought women were delicate and prone to vapors. The mermaid was not above using human trickery if it meant the burning man would be removed from the museum, if it meant she would no longer have to endure the continuous pressure of his gaze.
Barnum appeared appalled at the thought that Amelia might be bedridden for a full day. She could read the words in his eyes: But the ticket sales! Who would come to the museum without the mermaid?
“Very well,” Barnum said. “Tomorrow I shall come into the saloon myself and have a look at this gentleman. If he appears to be as great a threat as you say, I will have him removed. For the sake of your health, of course.”
“Of course,” Amelia murmured.
“Of course,” Charity said.
Levi muttered something rude under his breath, but they all pretended not to hear it.
* * *
• • •
Barnum hated to admit it, but the boy and the mermaid and Charity were right. There was something very wrong with that man, the one Amelia called “the burning man.”
It wasn’t just the staring—though that was disconcerting enough—or his profound stillness. It was the way he didn’t seem to breathe, and how he seemed completely unaware of the press of people all around him.
Barnum thought if he climbed inside the man’s skull he would see only one thing—the mermaid. The man didn’t even appear to see the tank. Only Amelia.
Yes, Barnum could see how the man would make the mermaid uncomfortable. He made Barnum uncomfortable, and Barnum wasn’t the one being gaped at.
“Now do you see?” Levi hissed in his ear.
Barnum scratched his nose. “I see. What I’m wondering is how to solve the problem without drawing attention to him.”
“Send your goons out with him when the saloon closes,” Levi said. “They can encourage him to go outside and make it clear he’s not to return back in.”
“Are you implying I should incite those men to violence, Levi?” Barnum asked.
“Yes, if it’s necessary,” Levi said. “There must be no uncertainty on his part. He can’t think he’s welcome here.”
The boy really did want that staring fellow away from his mermaid, Barnum thought. Levi wasn’t the sort to condone a beating for no reason. If anything, Levi had expressed several times that he was uncomfortable with the guards Barnum hired and the threat they represented.
“And what if he does return?” Barnum asked. “What then?”
“I can sketch a likeness of him,” Levi said. “We can give it to the ticket takers and the guards at the front door and tell them he’s not to be allowed in.”
“It’s a solution,” Barnum said. “You go and get something to sketch with and make his portrait. Bring it right to the admission booth when you have it, and make one for each of those simpletons at the front door as well. They’ll need to keep it in their pocket to check against the folks coming in.”
“You’ll tell the guards here to follow the man out of the building?” Levi said, hovering instead of getting on with the task Barnum gave him.
“I’ll make sure your mermaid is safe,” Barnum said. “You used to trust me, Levi.”
Levi hesitated, then nodded and left.
>
It wasn’t an easy thing, getting over to the guards to speak to them. Barnum was a celebrity in his own museum. Once Levi left, many people felt free to talk to him, to compliment him for managing to get hold of the mermaid, to ask him questions, or just to shake his hand.
He fell into what he did best—performing. He told stories about the Feejee Mermaid that he claimed to have heard from Dr. Griffin. He promised all and sundry that the mermaid would be at the museum for five more months, and that they certainly should write to their relatives in North Carolina or Pennsylvania or Tennessee to come and see her. He agreed many times that the mermaid was an eighth wonder of the world.
Then the clock struck the hour, and everyone was chivvied out of the saloon. By the time Barnum managed to extricate himself from the last person, the saloon was empty. The staring man was gone.
It will be all right, Barnum told himself, though he felt a slither of unease. Levi would have his drawing, and the man wouldn’t be allowed back in the museum.
Even if he did somehow manage to pay his admission fee and enter again . . . well, Barnum would just tell the guards now what they ought to do when the next performance ended. They were to follow the staring man out and explain that he wasn’t to return. Barnum would make it clear that this explanation could be made using their fists.
Amelia climbed out of the tank and looked expectantly at him.
“Don’t worry, I’m making an arrangement,” Barnum said, turning his head away from her. The girl had no shame about her nakedness at all.
He lingered in the saloon after the performance started again, but he did not see the staring man.
There, he thought. Levi’s drawing will do the trick.
But when he went to speak to the clerks at the end of the day, none of them had seen the staring man since that morning.
“I recognized him, though, when Mr. Lyman showed me the picture,” Jeremiah Steward told him. “He pays a fee about twelve times a day. I always wondered why. But today he only entered one time. Is he a criminal?”
“He might be,” Barnum said evasively. It was too much to explain to this wet-eared boy that the man stared overlong at the mermaid and made her feel sick to her stomach. “If you see him, you be sure to tell one of the guards, make sure they remove him.”
“I will, sir,” Jeremiah said.
* * *
• • •
Amelia did not feel comforted by the staring man’s abrupt disappearance. Rather, it somehow made her more uneasy, and she kept watching for him to reappear for the remainder of the day.
“He probably was warned off by Barnum’s presence in the hall. Whatever he wanted from you, he wasn’t about to try it under the owner’s nose,” Levi said. “Barnum can be good for some things, occasionally.”
But Amelia could not lose the feeling that the man had not given up. He had only shifted to the shadows instead of the light, and every moving shadow made her heart stop.
That night she told Charity, in private, that she no longer wanted to stay at the hotel.
“I know Barnum thinks it’s a benefit to the exhibit,” Amelia said. “It’s only that I don’t feel safe there, even with the guards.”
“I’ll speak to Taylor about it,” Charity said.
She had been different since the day she told Barnum she would leave him—more confident, more certain of her own power.
“Levi and I will have you out of that room and back here before tomorrow evening,” Charity said. “Tonight will be the last night, I promise you.”
Amelia rested her head on Charity’s shoulder. “Thank you.”
Caroline, seeing the two of them sitting close together, ran to put her own head on Amelia’s shoulder. Charity laughed.
“Can’t anyone have the mermaid except you?” she asked.
“No,” Caroline said, and put her arms possessively around Amelia’s waist.
Amelia stroked the girl’s hair and wished she could stay right there, safe in the embrace of her sisters.
“It’s only one more evening,” Charity said. “Taylor will take some persuading. You know how he enjoys holding forth for the reporters every morning.”
“Yes,” Amelia said.
But when the time came for Levi to escort her back across the square, Amelia did not want to leave. She hugged Charity at the door with an urgency she couldn’t explain, and when they parted, Charity had tears in her eyes.
“Amelia,” she said.
“Let the girl go. She’ll be back soon enough in the morning,” Barnum said.
“Taylor, let her stay here tonight,” Charity said. “It’s not safe with that man out there. We don’t know what happened to him.”
“He had his fill of the mermaid, or he ran out of pocket money,” Barnum said. “If he tries to enter the museum again, he’ll be turned away. There’s no need to fuss, Charity.”
Amelia could see that for Barnum, the incident was already fading, that his memory was telling him the man wasn’t as much of a threat as he had seemed, that the whole thing had been nothing but a woman’s imagination run wild and now his own wife had caught the disease.
“I’ll watch out for her, Charity,” Levi assured her. “I promise.”
Charity gave him a fierce look. “You had just better, Levi Lyman, or I shall never forgive you.”
She embraced Amelia again and kissed her cheek. “I will see you in the morning.”
Amelia thought Charity meant it to sound like a promise, but it seemed more like a wish, a prayer against harm. Amelia did not know who heard such wishes and prayers, but she hoped they were listening.
Barnum and Charity closed the door behind them as Levi and Amelia walked through the short hallway to the outer door. Amelia paused before they went out into the night.
“Levi,” she said.
She had so many things inside her, so many feelings rising up, filling her throat and her nose and her eyes. There was so much she couldn’t speak, couldn’t tell him about the thing that had been slowly building every time he took her arm or tried to make her smile or arrived with an extra bowl of sugar cubes for her tea.
She didn’t know how to tell him that she relied on seeing him each day, waving from the back of the crowd, that the knowledge that he was somewhere about and would appear was her greatest comfort. She didn’t know how to tell him that she knew what he felt and that he was straight and true and she wanted him, wanted him as she never thought she would want another man after Jack died.
It seemed a strange time for her to finally face these feelings, these things that she’d been pushing down inside and pretending weren’t there ever since the night he stood in her hotel room and apologized for something he hadn’t even done.
Levi looked at her, misinterpreted her expression, and patted her shoulder. “Don’t be troubled by him, Amelia. I promised Charity I would keep you safe, and I will.”
“It’s not that,” she said, and she kissed him.
She tasted surprise on his tongue, and wonder, and delight. And inside her was an answering delight that rose up to mingle with his.
Then she pulled away and looked at him.
“Why now?” he asked.
“Because I wanted you to know,” she said.
He accepted that, the way he accepted all things about her. He offered her his arm again and she took it, and she walked a little closer to him than was strictly polite.
The burning man waited for them.
CHAPTER 12
He rose out of the darkness, and Amelia saw the muzzle of the gun only for a moment before it flashed fire.
Her nose filled with the stink of gunpowder. Levi cried out, but all she heard was his voice, the burning man’s voice. It was slender and reedy and had no power except that of belief.
“This I say then, walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfill t
he lust of the flesh. For the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh: and these are contrary the one to the other: so that ye cannot do the things that ye would.”
There was blood on her dress, and pain in her body, and she fell to the ground and she was so surprised, surprised and amazed because she thought she couldn’t bleed like this. She had thought she couldn’t die.
The ball was in her stomach, she felt it scorching through her like the burning man’s words, and she didn’t want to discover that she really was mortal after all, not when she’d found Levi and she wasn’t alone anymore.
Levi’s boots were beside her head and then they weren’t. She heard a huffing sound and the impact of a fist on bone, but the burning man didn’t stop talking; he didn’t even slow down because he was on fire inside and Amelia could hear it; she could hear the crackling of the flames and she was sorry for him, sorry because inside him was all this heat and smoke, and if you’re on fire you don’t know what to do with that except light someone else so that they catch fire, too.
“Now the works of the flesh are manifest, which are these: adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, idolatry, witchcraft . . . of which I tell you before, as I have also told you in time past, that they which do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God.”
“Levi,” Amelia said, or thought she said.
Levi, don’t. Levi, help me. Help me. It hurts.
Her voice seemed so quiet and so small. She wasn’t sure her words made it out of her mouth. They seemed stuck behind her teeth.
There was more thudding, the persistent wet sound of Levi’s fist hitting the other man’s face and making it bleed.
“Levi,” she said.
Help me I’m on fire.
But he couldn’t hear her, because her insides were blazing and her voice was trapped in the smoke and the door to the Barnums’ apartment opened behind her and then Charity was screaming, screaming, screaming.
* * *
• • •
The Mermaid Page 18
