A Circus of Brass and Bone

by Abra SW

  In the distance, the Indian mahout sprinted along the road on his elephant. For something so large and gangly, it moved with frightening speed. That the mahout stayed on its back said something for his tenacity, his skill, and his disregard for his own mortality.

  Dr. Janzen picked up his sturdy walking stick and his black bag, and he set off after the rest. He was nearly to the curve in the road when he heard the sharp bark of a gun. He broke into a run.

  When he rounded the hill, breathing hard, the first thing he saw was the equestrienne struggling to control her rearing mare. She leaned forward against its neck, both her hands wrapped in its mane. A strange man lay dead in front of her, a rifle in his hand. Her derringer lay between the mare’s dancing hooves.

  Dr. Janzen needed only to glance at the dead man to see the cause of death: a red-black tunnel into his skull where his eye should be.

  “I didn’t know you were a sharpshooter, Miss,” he said, looking up at the equestrienne.

  She laughed shakily as she succeeded in getting the mare to settle with all four feet on the ground. “Not I. When I wouldn’t dismount at riflepoint, he grabbed my stirrup and tried to pull me down. My derringer nearly touched him when I pulled the trigger.”

  Many of the boys who’d fought in the War would have hesitated to shoot a man so close, Dr. Janzen thought. Shock must be insulating her from her natural feminine reaction.

  “How many were there?”

  “Three others. They fled into the woods when I fired. The men went after them, except for him.” She nodded at the Indian mahout.

  The mahout rested on top of his elephant, his face inscrutable but his eyes flickering back and forth along the road and the woods. With him standing lookout, Dr. Janzen went to the supply wagon.

  The wagon master was just coming to. He grumbled as he tried to push himself up from the wagon bed. “Young ne’er-do-wells. They weren’t even good at being ne’er-do-wells! They hit me on the head, but not near as hard as I’ve been hit before!”

  “Maybe they weren’t trying to kill you,” Dr. Janzen said, helping the older man to sit up. “Whoa!” he added, as the supply master tried to stand. “Let me take a look at you.”

  “I need to see what the bastards got,” the supply master protested.

  “In a minute.” Dr. Janzen took a candle out of his bag, lit it, and held it close to one of the supply master’s eyes, and then the other. “Your pupils aren’t reacting equally. Don’t drink hard liquor or lift anything heavy until after breakfast tomorrow.”

  “I don’t drink hard liquor until at least noon, anyway.” The supply master tried to stand again. “Can you tell me what the bastards got?”

  “I can tell you that you’ll probably live,” Dr. Janzen said acerbically, “since you’re so concerned. Come find me if you feel yourself falling asleep in the middle of the day. That could mean you’ve got bleeding on your brain. And avoid any further trauma.”

  “What’s that?” The supply master stared at him suspiciously.

  “Try not to get hit on the head again!”

  With a grunt of acknowledgment, the supply master pushed himself up and began taking inventory. He tended to repeat himself and to wobble slightly, but at least he wasn’t trying to lift anything heavy. Yet. With a sigh, Dr. Janzen climbed back out of the wagon.

  The roustabouts returned empty-handed from their pursuit, though they bore the bruises and cuts of combat. “Come along to my wagon,” Dr. Janzen told them sternly. “You need to clean those with boiling water and lye soap.”

  The tallest one scoffed. “It’s just a couple of scrapes. We’re big strong men; we’ll be fine without a nurse.

  We got the strangers, too. One has a broken arm, and another has a knife stuck in his shoulder.” He nodded respectfully to the knife-thrower.

  The attackers weren’t alone in their injuries. The tally on the circus’ side stood at one sprained wrist, two head injuries, three broken toes (one of the roustabouts had dropped his mallet on his own foot in the heat of the moment), and a plethora of scrapes and bruises.

  The less-damaged men helped the injured back to the caravan, and at Dr. Janzen’s request, the mahout slung the stranger’s corpse across the back of the elephant and took it with them.

  The caravan’s defenders lowered their rifles and leaned them against the wagons as soon as they saw that the return was a victorious one. Dr. Janzen observed hands that shook and eyes that showed a little too much white around the edges. The midget and his wife began to quarrel over who bore the responsibility for cleaning their child-sized .22 rifle. The two female aerialists yawned in unison. The skeleton man sat in the grass beside his wagon, eating a chunk of bread that he held with both hands as if he were afraid it would be snatched away from him. All signs of stress that might lead to nervous disorders if not ameliorated.

  Usually, the ringmaster enforced a rest day—or two, if needed—every five days or so, as soon as they found a good place to camp. They were past due. Dr. Janzen edged closer to the equestrienne. “Do the horses need a break?”

  She frowned as she studied the horses hitched up to the wagons. “Yes, if we want to keep them healthy. And given how expensive these were to get, we want to keep them healthy. I’ll speak to the head hostler, though he’s probably already keeping an eye out for good places to camp.” She looked around. “This isn’t a bad spot. There’s space enough between the trees over there, and I think I see a creek—.”

  “The horses might not care, but the people would probably prefer if we camped a bit further away from where we were attacked.”

  “Ah, yes.” She nodded. “I daresay you’re right.”

  Dr. Janzen studied her and wondered. Shock, or nerves of steel?

  “Thank you, Doctor,” she said, before striding off in search of the head hostler.

  The midget fight had grown to include the maintenance of their wagon, how she didn’t mend his costumes fast enough, and how he had been ogling female townies of the tall persuasion. The rifle waved in the air. Dr. Janzen sighed.

  Unearthing the root of their stress can only help.

  “The attackers have been driven off,” he said. “We are safe now.”

  Or not.

  They both glared at him.

  “Sure we are!” the midget scoffed. “It’s not like there’s a murderer among us, oh no!”

  “Yes,” his wife added, with a glower that was small, but fierce. “Don’t you have something to add to that, Doctor?”

  Those nearby left off their other activities to watch with interest. Their expressions gave Dr. Janzen little hope of escape, despite his attacker’s small stature.

  “You took the ringmaster’s body,” she accused him. “You kept the lamp in your wagon burning the night long, and we all heard sawing and squishing noises coming from under your door.”

  He winced. I must try blocking the door with a feed sack to mute the sound.

  “So who killed him?” the midget asked, in as close to a non-combative tone as Dr. Janzen had ever heard him use.

  The only sound was the rustling of leaves and the shush of the horses shifting their hooves.

  “I—think that would be best told to someone in authority,” Dr. Janzen tried.

  “In case you hadn’t noticed, the ‘authority’ is dead!”

  “Of course I noticed!” Dr. Janzen said. “I meant—.” He gave up. “Very well. I’ll tell you what I found once everyone’s gathered. Everybody should hear this at once.”

  They gathered with remarkable speed, faster even than when Cook made his famous Dutch oven apple pie.

  He did it quick, like an amputation. “You all saw he’d been stabbed. What you didn’t see was that he’d been poisoned.”

  Gasps. A rising murmur that he raised his voice to speak above.

  “More than once, if—as I suspect—his seasickness was no such thing. The sweats, vomit—I wager if I’d looked in his chamber pot, I’d have found bloody feces.”

  He
pointed to the candy seller. “You were playing cards and saw him right before he died. He looked tired. You thought he winked at you to wish you luck. He wasn’t tired, and that was no wink. Those were poisoning symptoms. His eyelids drooped, his skin had a pallor, and his lymph nodes were swollen when he died.”

  “He was poisoned?” the equestrienne asked, her eyes wide and astonished.

  “Yes. The murderer probably stabbed him to death because the first two attempts failed.”

  “What kind of a knife did he use?” the knife-thrower asked, his tone uneasy as he fingered the blade on his belt. The crowd drew back from him.

  “A thin knife with an unusual curve at the end,” Dr. Janzen said.

  The knife-thrower relaxed. “None of mine are curved,” he explained to his neighbors. “Makes the balance more difficult.”

  “There!” Dr. Janzen told the midget. “Now you know. Do you feel better?”

  “Not—especially.”

  “Poison,” the fortune teller mused.

  An unnatural silence descended over the crowd, broken only when the railer returned from scouting up the road. The railer’s job was to ride ahead and find the best road for the circus to take. When the road forked, he found the roads that dead-ended in a muddy bog or led away from the caravan’s destination, and he took a rail from a farmer’s fence and used it to block off those paths. He shouldn’t have been back in the middle of the day.

  “Why are you back so soon?” Dr. Janzen asked him, hoping to distract the others from their dark thoughts. Distraction was a good technique for coping with pain, whether the pain be physical or mental.

  “The head hostler told me to keep an eye out for a good spot to camp for a day or two,” the railer said. “There’s a small town in the valley up ahead that has the space and seems friendly. A nice lady offered me dinner and a place to sleep in her boarding house, for free, but I thought I should report back. Mrs. Margaret Della Rocca, her name is. She seems to be the local welcoming committee. Came right out to greet me when I rode into Seppanen Town. Won’t she be surprised to see all of us!”

  “How long of a ride is it?” the equestrienne asked. “The horses are already tired.”

  “We could make it by sunset if we pushed the pace. The horses would be able to rest for a couple of days afterward.”

  “You seem eager to get back.”

  The railer sighed. “She had buttermilk biscuits baking. They smelled delicious.”

  “A rest would do us good,” Dr. Janzen observed.

  “The horses won’t make it all the way to New York,” the equestrienne added.

  “And where better to stop than in a nice, friendly town,” the fortune teller concluded.

  ~ * ~

  It did look like a nice town, Dr. Janzen thought approvingly as they approached the outskirts. A wooden sign welcomed them to Seppanen Town, Population—blank. The number had been scraped off, though the welcome hadn’t.

  Through maple trees glowing golden-red in the light of the setting sun, he saw a fresh-cleared space with dozens of grave mounds in it. No church sat nearby, so the grave site must have been made in a hurry, but it was well-away from the town’s water supply. Each grave had a proper wooden cross at its head and a mound of rocks on top of it to keep animals from unearthing the dead. Good planning and good hygiene.

  The circus caravan rolled past a long field of dark green chicory. A scattering of summer’s flowers still shone the cobalt blue of bachelor’s buttons and Union hospital medicine bottles. Men and women walked the rows, pulling the plants and tossing them in wide woven baskets. Children worked alongside them. A heavily pregnant woman sat on a stump at the edge of the field, keeping guard with a shotgun resting on her knees. They must have had bandit trouble, too.

  One of the men working the rows straightened and stared at the circus as it passed. A youngish fellow with an open, honest sort of face, he wore clothes of a cut and cloth too fine for his labor. Everyone must work in a community this small, if they wish to survive the winter. Perhaps he was a shop assistant, before the storm.

  The young man stared after the circus with a focus Dr. Janzen found alarming. It was not the reaction of amused interest or mild disdain they usually received. That intensity put him in mind of a few of the inmates in the mental asylum he’d toured as part of his medical education. Perhaps the young man was one of those individuals who became unbalanced on the subject of moral corruption and saw the circus as the Whore of Babylon. I should warn … The thought trailed off. He would have warned the ringmaster, but that individual was beyond warning now.

  The warmth of the town’s welcome reassured him. A little girl from the chicory field darted in front of the circus and sprinted ahead to beat them into town, her sandals flapping and her pigtails bobbing as she ran. As the lead circus wagon turned onto Main Street, the little girl trotted back out of the general goods store with a lolly in her hand and a burly, balding man in a shopkeeper’s apron following behind her.

  The shopkeeper blanched a bit as wagons kept rolling down Main Street, but he recovered quickly and stepped out to greet them. “Welcome to Seppanen Town, strangers!” he called. “Just passing through?”

  At the front of the procession, the equestrienne reined her white mare to a halt. “We’re the Loyale Traveling Circus. We need to camp and rest the horses for a couple of days before proceeding on to New York. When was the last time your town had a circus visit?”

  “Ah, quite some time!” the shopkeeper managed.

  “Where would the best place for us to camp be?”

  “Why don’t you, um, fine folks come see Mrs. Della Rocca? She runs our boarding house. She likes welcoming visitors personally.” His gaze fell on the rather battered-looking roustabouts walking beside the wagons. “She was a nurse in the War, too, and she does pretty well patching us up.”

  The equestrienne looked questioningly over her shoulder at the rest of the circus folk. Nobody said aye or nay. She shrugged and then dismounted gracefully, letting the reins fall from her hand to hang loose. Her mare stood stock-still, as if she’d been anchored in the middle of the street. “Thank you. I’d be delighted.”

  Dr. Janzen got down from his wagon to follow her, as did a handful of other circus folk, including the railer, the strongman, the conjoined sisters, and the roustabouts who’d been a little banged up fighting off bandits. The rest stayed close to the circus wagons, a wise practice in a strange town, even an ostensibly friendly one.

  Ginger the clown, however, walked down the block to an establishment graced by an ornately carved sign advertising “Sally’s Saloon.” Dr. Janzen shook his head disapprovingly. Every town they stopped in, the first thing the clown did was head to the saloon. If he didn’t take better care of himself, he’d die with pebbles of scar tissue scaling his alcohol-soaked liver.

  Mrs. Della Rocca seemed much more wholesome. She opened her door wearing an apron lightly dusted in flour and adorned by promisingly food-like stains.

  “Welcome!” she said. “You must be new to town! My, what an awful lot of you there are!” She tossed a questioning glance in the storekeeper’s direction.

  “A whole circus came to town,” he said quickly. “This is just a couple of them.”

  “We were hoping to find a place to camp, where we could break from traveling for a few days. Of course, we’ll perform while we’re here,” the equestrienne interjected.

  “How wonderful,” Mrs. Della Rocca said. “Where are you headed?”

  “New York.”

  “Lovely.” She caught the storekeeper’s eye. “And then they’ll all be going on to New York City,” she repeated absently. “Shouldn’t you be getting back to your store?”

  “Oh. Yes’m.” He bobbed his head and ducked out.

  “Come on in,” she invited the circus folk. The equestrienne stepped over the threshold. The railer followed eagerly (no doubt hoping for buttermilk biscuits), and the others straggled after.

  Inside, Dr. Janzen snif
fed. The air smelt of flour and cinnamon and cloves and—smoke?

  Mrs. Della Rocca’s eyes widened when she noticed the bruises and scrapes the roustabouts had acquired. “Oh dear, you’re hurt! Come into the kitchen where I keep my supplies. I was a nurse in the War, you know.”

  The same big strong men who’d resisted Dr. Janzen’s ministrations followed her as meekly as kittens.

  A faint scent of burning lingered in the kitchen, and a pan of scorched buttermilk biscuits sat on top of the stove beside a pan of bloody water.

  Following Dr. Janzen’s gaze, Mrs. Della Rocca laughed, though it sounded forced. “Those biscuits might go to feed the hogs, I’m afraid. The beef fared better. I don’t know how it was where you were when that unnatural storm hit, but we lost half our herds, between the ones that died outright and the ones that sickened after. We hung and cured what meat we could, but it’s still steak for breakfast, lunch, and dinner!”

  She gestured to an unbaked pumpkin pie sitting on her kitchen table, next to a roll of bandages. “But the pumpkins are ripe now, though we’re short hands to pick them. I am so looking forward to seeing that pumpkin pie at breakfast tomorrow. But listen to me ramble on!”

  “Pumpkin pie,” a girl’s voice murmured longingly. Dr. Janzen thought it was one of the conjoined sisters.

  He had to agree with her sentiment. He wished for more variety, too. Their dinners were getting awfully repetitive, though Cook grumbled so much about the lack of supplies that nobody dared complain—which was no doubt the point.

  ~ * ~

  Ginger, the Whitefaced Clown

  Seppanen Town, Connecticut

  “I’ll have a blackstrap, please,” Ginger said, leaning against the bar. Behind him, the door swung open and the burly storekeeper who’d welcomed the circus into town came in and sat down in a corner. Odd. The sun wasn’t down yet; there was still business to be done.

  The curly-haired woman behind the bar lifted down a bottle of rum and a jar of molasses and began mixing the drink. “Military man, are you? Sailor?”

  “Why do you ask that?”

  “Some men get a taste for the rum.”