A Circus of Brass and Bone

by Abra SW

  ~ * ~

  Christopher Knall

  Seppanen Town, Connecticut

  Christopher hovered near the edge of the circus encampment. He wore the rough clothes of the laborer disguise. The circus tents had been set up on the other side of the field. The music and lights would attract the townsfolk. When he saw Ginger approaching, burlap sack over his shoulder, he hurried out to meet him.

  “How did it go?” he demanded.

  “Her understanding of the situation has been—altered.” Ginger gave Christopher an up-and-down assessment. “You look strained.”

  “Have you ever tried wrangling that many kids? I was happy as heck to turn them loose. With all the townsfolk heading out for the circus, though, I’m worried somebody will recognize me.”

  “Recognize you as what?”

  Christopher struggled for words. “Recognize me as any of the things I’ve been!”

  Ginger smiled. “I’ll put you into clown makeup and a costume. Nobody will look at a clown and see a Pinkerton, or an escaped laborer.”

  “Is that what being a clown is about?” Christopher asked. “Hiding who you really are?”

  “Oh, it’s nothing that simple,” Ginger said. His voice was grave, but his eyes were merry. “Being a clown is about becoming whoever is needed, whenever they’re needed.”

  ~ * ~

  Dr. Christopher Janzen, the Great Doctor Panjandrum and His Amazing Panacea That Cures All Ills!

  Seppanen Town, Connecticut

  Dr. Janzen, as the Great Doctor Panjandrum, gave his spiel and sold his snake oil and noted down the names of those who complained of muscle aches and weakness, or nervous energy. He would give the names to Mrs. Della Rocca. She could keep her eye on them, though that might not do much good. It was a long list.

  After the townies returned home, he retired to his wagon. He stared glumly at the bed. He didn’t see himself sleeping well for a long time to come.

  A knock on the door shook him from his reverie. “Hello,” the fortune teller said, when he opened the door. “I was wondering if we could leave the body of the ‘bandit’ here so Seppanen Town can give him a decent burial.”

  He coughed. “Ah, that might not be a good idea. He’s a bit—cut up.”

  Behind her veil, the fortune teller’s lips moved in an unexpected smile. “Now, would that tendency be why you lost your license? Did you pay the grave robbers for their harvest?”

  “A knowledge of the human body is indispensable for a practicing doctor,” he said stiffly. “The education given in most medical schools is wholly inadequate. If the knowledge I have was gained by unconventional means, it has still saved many lives.”

  She sighed happily. “I do love it when the pieces fall together. But, ah, you should bury the body before it starts to smell. No keeping it in formaldehyde.” She paused. “Nobody will complain about the ringmaster, though. He’ll make a nice addition to the Museum of Educational Novelties. And after all, his body might be evidence in a murder trial. The police tend to get cranky when you dispose of evidence.”

  He stared at her. “Who are you?”

  Chapter 8

  ~* * *~

  The Peculiar Case of the Fortune Teller’s Veil, Part I

  Rajesh, the Hindoo Mystic, and His Fearsome Aether-Powered Bone-and-Brass Elephant!

  A Few Miles From New York City

  Turban, or no turban? The bloody thing made Martin Smythe’s head itch, but it was part of the disguise. He’d worn it for three weeks straight when he first joined the circus, until the circus members all accepted him as Rajesh, the Indian mahout. Anyone who’d ever read a penny-dreadful recognized the Indian mystic type. Give them a turban, a few cryptic statements, and a yoga pose or two, and they’d fill in the rest.

  Most of the disguise he liked. He enjoyed practicing yoga again—it hadn’t been quite the thing at Cambridge, though he would have appreciated a good revitalizing stretch after some of those cricket matches. And though his thick Indian accent might be a bit over the top, it made a change from having to disguise all hint of his mother tongue. That dratted turban was another matter.

  He sighed. When the Maharana of Udaipur gave you a mission, you did a pukka job of it. You tried not to doubt whether there was still a Maharana, or an Udaipur, or a British India. You tried not to wonder if your widowed mother still lived, if she still brought her dupatta up to cover her mouth when she laughed, if she still made chapatis for the neighborhood kids.

  Martin reined his thoughts in with an effort.

  At least the bloody turban was so conspicuous that nobody seeing it would ever suspect he had anything sneaky in mind. He squared the turban on his head, slid his Gurkha knife inside his embroidered waistcoat, and slipped out of his wagon.

  Against the rich blue of the sky before dawn, trees stretched their skeletal limbs up to the heavens. The circus wagons were dark, quiet lumps. The morning air carried the shifting of the horses, the yawns and grumbles of the menagerie animals, and the first chirpings of the dawn chorus. In the distance, the skyline of New York City loomed like a distant mountain range.

  Martin felt a cold foreboding in the pit of his stomach as he stared at the darkened city. What awaited them there? What awaited him there?

  He shrugged it off and wound his way through the maze of circus wagons. Pre-mission jitters, that was all it was. Collywobbles. He should have taken care of this earlier. As soon as he saw the skeleton man produce that coded page with the name of the ringmaster’s Boston contact, he’d guessed that there were other pages that the skeleton man kept to himself. He could have interrogated the skeleton man during those early, hectic days, but the man’s disappearance would seem more natural now. In Boston, people might have wondered where the skeleton man could go, but here—well, New York was still a fine, large city to disappear in. It made more sense to do it here. Besides, Martin admitted to himself, I was shaken by the catastrophe. Thrown off my game. Who wouldn’t be? It was like the lord of death himself had come to earth.

  Martin passed under the shadow of his mechanical elephant and knocked on the door of the wagon beside it. Last night, he’d been careful to position the beast beside this particular wagon.

  No sound came from inside. He knocked again. He heard muffled grumbling and the creak of the floorboards. A match hissed, and light seeped from under the crack in the door. The door swung open, and the skeleton man squinted out. “What do you want, Rajesh?” he asked, shining the lantern into Martin’s eyes. “It’s hardly the time for a social call.”

  Martin waggled his head in that yes-no Indian gesture he knew foreigners found so annoying. “I am having these sausages,” he said, “but my religion is forbidding me from the eating of cows, and I am wondering—”

  “Come in, come in!” the skeleton man said, all smiles at the mention of sausages, even though Martin’s hands were empty.

  He’d taken the lure. It even happened to be true. After years of eating beef in England, Martin felt a sudden rush of freedom at being able to say so. Trying to persuade himself that only Indian cows were sacred hadn’t helped much. He’d made such sacrifices for his country—and he didn’t mean England.

  As Martin stepped up into the wagon, he thought he heard a rustle nearby. But when he scanned his surroundings, he saw only the dark blotches of wagons.

  The inside of the skeleton man’s wagon appeared to be half the size of the outside because of the jumble it held. Stacks of books and newspaper broadsheets and candy tins rose to the ceiling. Bric-a-brac nestled in the nooks and crannies. Silk flowers and ribbons dangled from the ceiling and spilled across the floor. Martin took a step further inside, closed the door, and had to duck as the movement sent a ham dangling from the ceiling to swinging in a hazardous arc.

  “Sausages?” the skeleton man asked, holding out his hands. Those long, thin fingers trembled slightly.

  “Not yet,” Martin said. “I am wanting a trade, yes? You are finding papers in the ringmaster’s cabin?” His
accent slipped a little, but it hardly mattered.

  “Yeeesss,” the skeleton man said warily, backing away. “I gave them to the fortune teller and the equestrienne when we reached Boston.”

  “I am trading the sausages for the other papers.”

  The skeleton man shook his head quickly. “There were no other papers. And where are these sausages anyways?”

  Martin ignored the question. “You are lying.” He let the last traces of his thick Indian accent slip away as he backed the skeleton man into the corner. He slid his Gurkha knife out of his waistcoat, angling it so the lantern light ran along its blade.

  The skeleton man kept shaking his head, his eyes riveted on that sharp gleam of light. From the direction of the wagon window, Martin heard a faint scratching sound, as if a short person were trying to pull themself up to peer in the window. He spun and dashed to the door.

  When he threw open the door and leapt out, knife in hand and ready for an ambush, he found—nothing. The person, if person there had been, was gone.

  The scuffle of footsteps inside the wagon behind him gave him enough warning to dive forward and seize the door before the skeleton man could slam it shut and throw the bar. The door still slammed, but on Martin’s hand instead. Red pain seared through him, but he bit back both the pain and the urge to scream or swear aloud.

  He reached around with his other hand and muscled the door open despite the skeleton man’s attempt to hold it shut. It wasn’t difficult. The skeleton man, well, he was thin and stringy and mostly made of brittle bones.

  Once inside, Martin shut the door quietly and slid the bar across it. The skeleton man’s eyes widened. “Where are the papers?” Martin asked.

  The skeleton man shook his head, backing away. Martin felt a bit sorry for him, but he didn’t let it show in his face as he closed the distance, knife in hand. “Where are they?” he asked again.

  The skeleton man’s eyes flickered to the corner his bed was wedged into. A chocolate tin lay beside the bed. Martin crab-walked sideways, scooped the tin up, and shook it. They both heard the hissing sound of sliding paper. Careful to keep an eye on the skeleton man, Martin braced the tin against his hip and pried the lid off. He smiled when he saw the papers scribbled with code. “Did you take anything else?” he asked.

  The skeleton man shook his head.

  “Think, man! Was there anything else with these?”

  “Just a King James bible.”

  Martin felt a rush of excitement go through him. “Thank you. Sorry for the scare I must have given you. Here, sit down.” He gestured to the bed.

  The skeleton man perched on the edge and smiled back at him tentatively. Martin picked up the blanket from the bed and wrapped it around the skeleton man’s shoulders. Then he took one quick step closer and rammed his knife between his ribs. The skeleton man’s face whitened. He pressed a hand to his chest. “You.”

  “Sorry, old chap.” If ‘twere done, ‘twere best done quickly, and all that rot. Martin jerked the knife out and brought it up in a smooth stroke across the skeleton man’s throat. He pulled the blanket up as he did so. The thick wool soaked up all the blood. A gurgle, a gasp, and then Martin was the only living person in the wagon.

  Into a burlap sack went—as best he could judge—the skeleton man’s most prized possessions, the ones that would be obvious in their absence or conspicuous in their presence. In these uncertain times, surely it was reasonable to think that a performer or two might run away to join the city? He avoided looking at the tintype photographs as he swept them into the sack.

  Finished, he blew out the lantern and opened the wagon door a crack. He listened. Nothing. He peered out. Nobody.

  He slipped out the door and went to the bone elephant. A sequence of taps with his mahout’s stick along the brass keys arrayed between the elephant’s ribs, and the elephant reached up with its snakelike leather trunk and pulled off the extra rug he’d thrown across its back last night. He wrapped the skeleton man’s body up in the rug, tied the ends up with rope, and hustled the parcel outside. Then he climbed up to sit on the elephant’s back, had the elephant lift the body, and breathed a deep sigh of relief. The riskiest part was past.

  He’d always practiced the elephant’s act with a toss-tool of a rug wrapped around a log, to prepare for just this eventuality. The first time people saw something body-shaped wrapped in a rug, they’d look close at it. The dozenth time, they wouldn’t even spare it a glance. Martin had hoped never to need the ruse, but he supposed that after the ringmaster grew suspicious, it was only a matter of time.

  He tapped his stick, and the elephant twirled the body, tossed it high in the air, and caught it. Another signal, and the elephant lurched forward, its ponderous dinner plate-sized feet crunching over the thin crust of snow. The rug-wrapped body twirled, swooped up into the air, and fell again, caught at the last moment by the elephant’s trunk. After the first mile, Martin stopped the show. Two miles farther away, he stopped in a copse of trees and dumped the skeleton man’s body and the bag of his precious possessions in a hollow. He covered the body with stones and fallen branches and then covered it with frozen leaves. He made a thorough job of it, despite his injured hand slowing him down. When he was done, nobody would have suspected a body lay there. The area still looked disturbed, but the next snow would cover that. He squinted at the grey-streaked sky. Perhaps even today.

  After he’d finished disposing of the body, he returned to the skeleton man’s wagon. He knelt and studied the ground next to the wagon window. He thought he saw something, but it was hard to be sure in the cool blue light of early dawn. He took a chance and lit the lantern.

  “Bloody hell,” he swore.

  There were boot prints under the window, small, neat ones with square heels. He studied them for a moment, imprinting the image into his mind, and then he blew out the lamp.

  Chapter 9

  ~* * *~

  The Peculiar Case of the Fortune Teller’s Veil, Part II

  Madame Tonya Wershow, Fortune Teller Extraordinaire

  The Loyale Traveling Circus Campground, Some Distance From New York City

  Tonya lay rigid in her wagon bunk. She waited to hear the sounds of the camp stirring to life around her. Then and only then would she allow herself to rise, light her lantern, and move about the wagon. She would join the others around the cooking fire. She would eat a hearty breakfast, and not in haste. Then she would walk out into the woods, as a modest woman might when she felt the call of nature.

  She would never come back. Last night, she’d overheard enough to initiate Operation White Rabbit. Madame Tonya Wershow, fortune teller extraordinaire, would cease to exist.

  Her eyes stared unseeing into the lightening dark. She heard the crackle of logs in the fire pit and the clank of Cook’s porridge cauldron being hoisted onto the spit. Not yet. She lay still and breathed deeply, in and out.

  The skeleton man had stolen the ringmaster’s secret files. Someone else—a new player—feared what was in those files, feared it enough to menace the skeleton man until he handed them over. This new player had a British accent, but she could have sworn she’d never heard his voice before. Had it been one of the hostlers they picked up on the docks of Bombay? The British card sharp who had been in deep to the wrong people until he slipped out of town with their caravan? A sleeper agent who had been in their caravan as long as she? If only she’d managed to see his face!

  Alas, when she had tried to pull herself up to peer in the skeleton man’s window, her foot had slipped, scraping the side of the wagon. She’d frozen. The thump of sudden movement inside the wagon had sent her bolting into the shadows. She didn’t try to linger to see who it was or—ha!—to ambush and capture them. That wasn’t her job.

  Today she must leave the circus, but it wasn’t as if she hadn’t known this day was coming.

  Tonya foresaw a dark future. The murder of the ringmaster, the aether storm, the riots and looting in Boston, the laborers involuntarily in
dentured in Seppanen Town, the many, many deaths—she didn’t need a crystal ball to know that bad times were a-coming ‘round the bend. When things got this bad, some people hid. Some people tried to carry on as though nothing had changed. Some people reveled in the chaos.

  “And some people,” Tonya said, finishing her thought out loud, “some people step up.”

  She’d expected to leave because she was more urgently needed elsewhere, not because of Operation White Rabbit. Still, the result would be the same: no more circus life for her.

  She would miss it. She enjoyed playing the flamboyant but mysterious fortune teller. They’d made quite a team: her, Ginger the clown, and the ringmaster. They’d traveled across the country, gathering information in places where an ordinary stranger would have roused attention but the circus was just another spectacle. Their performances gained them access to rich and powerful individuals who wanted private shows. At those shows, the circus provided the distraction, and they took away valuable information. The act had taken them all the way to British India and past the gates of the viceroy’s mansion.

  But times had changed, abruptly and cataclysmically. People with her skills would be needed. Besides, she doubted that the circus would be able to survive in this new world, especially since the regular infusions of cash from the ringmaster’s “investors” would surely end.

  She schooled her restless thoughts to stillness. Time passed. Morning light filtered in through the curtains. Circus folk began to move around the camp. Outside, a hostler swore as the water he hauled to the animals splashed on the ground. The enticingly acrid scent of coffee seeped into the wagon. It smelt much better than the weak, chicory-cut blend would actually taste.

  Horses snorted as they trotted past for their morning exercise, reliable as clockwork. Every morning, the equestrienne took her horses out for a run and made sure they were fed and watered before she sat down to her own breakfast.