Read an Excerpt
1. Nell It begins with an advertisement, nailed to an oak tree.
“Jasper Jupiter’s Circus of Wonders!” someone shouts.
“What is it?”
“The greatest show on earth!”
Everyone is shuffling forward, tutting, shouting. A woman shrieks, “Watch your wings!”
Through a gap between armpits, Nell glimpses a fragment of the handbill. The color sings, bright red edged in gold. An illustration of a bearded woman, dressed in a red doublet, golden wings clipped to her boots. “Stella the Songbird, Bearded Like a Bear!” Nell leans closer, straining to see the whole of the advertisement, to read the looping words. “Minnie, the Famed Behemoth”—a huge gray creature, long snouted—“Brunette, the Welsh Giantess. The World’s Smallest Museum of Curious Objects”—a sketch of a white crocodile in a jar, the sloughed skin of a snake.
At the top of the handbill, three times the size of any of the other acts, is a man’s face. His mustache is curled into two sharp brackets, cane held like a thunderbolt. “Jasper Jupiter,” she reads, “showman, presents a dazzling troupe of living curiosities—”
“What’s a living curiosity?” Nell asks her brother.
He doesn’t answer.
As she stands there, she forgets the endless cutting and tying of violets and narcissi, the numerous bee stings that swell her hands, the spring sun that bakes her skin until it looks parboiled. Wonder kindles in her. The circus is coming here, to their small village. It will pin itself to the salt-bleached fields behind them, stain the sky with splashes of exquisite color, spill knife jugglers and exotic animals and girls who strut through the streets as if they own them. She presses closer to her brother, listens to the racket of questions. Gasps, exclamations.
“How do they make the poodles dance?”
“A monkey, dressed as a tiny gallant!”
“Does that woman really have a beard?”
“Mouse pelts. It will be mouse pelts, fixed with glue.”
Nell stares at the handbill—its scrolled edges, its fierce colors, its shimmering script—and tries to burn it into her mind. She wishes she could keep it. She would like to sneak back when it is dark and pull loose the nails—gently, so as not to rip the paper—and look at it whenever she wants, to study these curious people as carefully as she pores over the woodcuts in the Bible.
Tent shows have often pitched in nearby towns, but never in their village. Her father even visited Sanger’s when it set up in Hastings. He told stories about boys with painted lips, men who rode horses upside down and fired pistols at pint pots. Marvels you wouldn’t believe. And the doxies—oh, as cheap as— He broke off, winked at Charlie. In the fields, news of circus disasters passed gleefully from mouth to mouth. Tamers eaten by lions, girls who tiptoed across high wires and tumbled to their deaths, fires that consumed the tent whole and roasted the spectators inside, boiled whales in their tanks.
There is a lull in the shouting, and into that a voice calls, “Are you in it?”
It is Lenny, the crate builder, his red hair falling into his eyes. He is grinning as if he expects everyone to join in. Those around him fall silent and, encouraged, he speaks more loudly. “Show us a handstand! Before the other wonders arrive.”
From the way her brother flinches, at first Nell thinks Lenny is talking to him. But it is impossible; there is nothing unusual about Charlie, and it is her who Lenny watches, his gaze sliding over her hands and cheeks.
The silence hangs, broken only by whispers.
“What did he say?”
“I didn’t hear!”
A shuffling, fidgeting.
Nell can feel the familiar burn of eyes on her. When she glances up, they startle, focus too intently on their fingernails, at a stone on the ground. They mean to be kind, she knows, to spare her the humiliation. Old memories split open. How, two years ago, the storm cast salt onto the violets and shriveled them, and her father pointed at her with a wavering finger. She’s a bad omen, and I said it the day she was born. How her brother’s sweetheart, Mary, is careful not to brush her hand by mistake. Is it catching? The bare stares of passing travelers, the mountebanks who try to sell her pills and lotions and powders. A life of being both intensely visible and unseen.
“What did you say, Lenny?” her brother demands, and he is poised, taut as a ratting terrier.
“Leave him,” Nell whispers. “Please.”
She is not a child, not a scrap of meat to be fought over by dogs. It is not their fight; it is hers. She feels it like a fist in her belly. She covers herself with her hands as if she is naked.
The crowd moves back as Charlie pounces, his arm pounding like the anvil of a machine, Lenny pinned beneath him. Somebody tries to pull him off, but he is a monster, swiping, kicking, flailing.
“Please,” she begs, reaching for her brother’s shirt. “Stop it, Charlie.”
She looks up. Space has opened around her. She is standing alone, fidgeting with the hem of her cap. A jewel of blood glints in the dust. Sweat circles the armpits of her dress. The minister hovers his hand over her shoulder as if to pat it.
Her bee stings throb, her hands bruised purple with sap.
Nell forces her way through the crowd. Behind her, the grunt of fighting, fabric tearing. She starts to walk toward the cliffs. She craves a swim, that low ache as her limbs fight the current. She will not run, she tells herself, but her footsteps soon hammer the ground and her breath is hot in her throat.
