“Are you ready, Delly?” she asked, turning, and barely managing not to jump when she discovered that Adeline was standing directly behind her, having crossed the wagon on silent feet while her mother wasn’t looking. She pressed a hand to her heart, trying to calm it. She had long since learned that there was no point in scolding Adeline for sneaking up on her; the child couldn’t help it. Some of the clowns even found it endearing, calling her a natural and beseeching her to don greasepaint and enter the ring.
(Those requests earned silent giggles from Adeline and shakes of the head from Annie, who knew better than anyone how important it was that her face never appear on a poster, even interpreted by an artist’s hand and concealed beneath a harlequin’s slap.)
Adeline was wearing a simple patched sundress with a shawl wrapped tight around her shoulders to ward away the end of summer chill. The hem covered her feet, making it difficult to tell whether she was wearing shoes. Annie decided not to ask. Adeline was a delicate child, but her constitution was good enough to handle a little mud, and it was best not to push too hard when there was no show to distract her.
“Very well,” said Annie. “To breakfast, then.”
Adeline smiled and took her mother’s hand, and the pair of them walked out into the morning air once more.
The Blackstone Circus was a small train, as such shows went: they had more wagons than was strictly required for transport of their equipment, but that was due to the number of families they had traveling with them. It had the benefit of making the circus seem larger than it was. Larger shows should have been a more tempting target for robbers, being more likely to have full coffers and healthy supply wagons, but somehow, the larger the circus, the more apt it was that raiders and the like would simply pass it by. Mr. Blackstone liked to say that it was a form of civic duty, the bad seeds of the badlands sparing the people who could take their minds off their petty woes for a few precious hours. Annie had a great deal of respect for Mr. Blackstone, but rather thought that he was talking out his nethers when he said that sort of thing.
Large circuses had powerful patrons. Powerful patrons didn’t like their toys being damaged by other people. Large circuses were thus substantially more likely to have dedicated security, gunslingers and the like who looked like ordinary roustabouts until they had reason to draw. A small show was less likely to have anything worth taking, but it was also more likely to be vulnerable. The extra family wagons were a form of camouflage, like a garter snake slapping its tail against rocks in an effort to sound like a rattler. They were trying to look more dangerous than they were.
There was no room along the road to set up the mess tent. That wasn’t enough to stop the chuck wagon from surging into action the moment they’d stopped. Annie and Adeline wove their way between parked wagons, following the smell of fatty bacon and honey-touched oatmeal, until they emerged into the clear band of space between the rest of the train and their temporary commissary.
They weren’t the first to come looking for breakfast, by a long shot. People sat on the porches of nearby wagons or on the ground; a few enterprising souls had even spread out picnic blankets. A group of circus orphans was clustered near the mess tent proper, eating their oatmeal as fast as they could, presumably in hopes of a second helping before the breakfast period ended. Adeline looked hopefully up at her mother.
“Of course,” said Annie, and let go of her hand. “Only please, attempt to eat like a lady, instead of like a wild thing found by the side of the road.”
Adeline wrinkled her nose and ran off to join her friends, kicking her skirts high enough in the process for Annie to see that the girl’s feet were, indeed, bare. She sighed. Autumn would come soon enough, with its thick socks and thrice-mended shoes. Best to let the girl have her fun now, while there was still fun to be had.
“Miss Pearl. Just who I was hoping to see this fine morning.” Nathanial stepped up next to her. He was nowhere near as quiet as Adeline, who could sneak up on Tranquility on some mornings, but he was quiet enough to startle two times out of three. “Did you sleep well? I was under the impression that you preferred your bed.”
“Does everyone know I spent the night in the oddities wagon, or are you simply reminding me that the ringmaster sees all, knows all, and has an opinion on all?”
“A few of the roustabouts saw you enter but didn’t see you leave. They came to me with their concerns when we stopped.” Nathanial smiled, the corners of his mustache flexing upward like the whiskers of a satisfied cat. “They did not, it seems, feel equipped to enter your chamber of horrors if it had already devoured you.”
“Seems they have a sense of self-preservation, then,” said Annie. “I fell asleep in Tranquility’s kennel.”
“You could take her into your wagon.”
Annie shook her head. “There’s no room for her, and she can be unpredictable where Delly is concerned.” Sometimes the big cat was Adeline’s fiercest protector. Other times, she would mutter and growl, eyeing the child like she thought that Delly might be a threat to her mistress. The loyalty of a lynx was not like the loyalty of a dog: it was not unshakable and inbred. It was a wild thing, as she was a wild thing, and Annie had lived through too many tragedies to go seeking another.
“Besides,” she added. “She has the loudest roar of anything short of those mangy tigers in the big tent. If there were actually a threat to the wagon, she would be able to notify me no matter where in the train I happened to be. That’s a powerful thing to have, given the other things she rides with.”
“All are fed and secure?”
“Yes, although I’ll need another dozen rats soon for the snakes, and more worms for Oscar. He’s getting bigger. Larger things need more food.”
“Yes,” agreed Nathanial, eyes on the chuck wagon. There were so many children clustered there that it seemed like a magic trick. How had they wound up with so many children?
In the usual ways. There were families traveling with the show; there were apprentices to be considered; there were the circus orphans, who could have been turned away, but who had nowhere else to go. If they were old enough to work, or came with a sibling who was old enough to work, he let them stay. That was how he had always run his show, and that was how he always would. It was a small thing, when set against the casual cruelty of an entire world. It was less than the world deserved.
Nathanial Blackstone had never been a slave. His parents had been freed before the accord that ended slavery across the continent: he had grown up being told over and over that it was the cut of his character, more than the color of his skin, that would determine his future. And that was all well and good, but when the white families around them had relatives back in the rich and settled East who were happy to keep sending money and care packages and everything else under the sun while his family and the families like them had to face the West without any support but what they gave each other, well. It was difficult not to see that as a lasting ripple from the great stone of slavery, still spreading outward, not yet reaching whatever wall would make it stop.
People liked to claim that once you pulled the knife out of someone’s back, everything was fine, but anyone who’d ever been stabbed knew that just wasn’t so. Knives made wounds. There was bleeding and infection to deal with long before the process of healing could properly begin, and even after the healing happened, there would always be scars. He’d bought his circus from a family that didn’t want it anymore, back when it had been three crumbling wagons, a rickety tent, and a handful of freaks who barely deserved the name—Wilma the Bearded Lady, with her spirit gum and her peach fuzz cheeks; Peter the Human Lobster, who should really have been called “Peter Who Never Learned Not to Grab Knives by the Blade,” and all their ilk—and he’d never looked back. He had painted and patched and bought more wagons, more attractions, expanded his tiny traveling empire until it almost seemed worthy of the name.
His mother, God rest her soul, had never been able to understand why her eldest son
wouldn’t want to put down roots; would choose to be a tumbleweed rolling across the West instead of a safely rooted sycamore growing in fertile soil. What she didn’t understand and he had never been able to explain to her was that sometimes being a tumbleweed was the key to staying alive. As long as he didn’t set down roots, he could move on whenever there was danger.
But he had set down roots. Every wagon in the circus train, every person who depended on him for their daily bread, they were his roots. It was his responsibility to make sure they didn’t wither and die.
“Is something wrong?”
Annie’s voice snapped him out of his contemplation. He sighed, turning toward her and attempting to force a realistic smile—or at least a believable one. “What would make you think that, o pearl beyond price?”
“You’re never quiet for this long,” she replied, crossing her arms. “What is it?”
Annie was a good woman, with a solid head on her shoulders. There had been times when he’d considered courting her in earnest. Adeline didn’t bother him the way she did some of the men with the circus: she was a good girl, and her silence wasn’t her fault. There just never seemed to be time. Running a circus was a constant commitment. Even when he was alone in his wagon, he was looking at routes, calculating supplies, and figuring out what needed to happen next. There was no such thing as a truly free moment. Not for him.
“Our next two shows have canceled,” he admitted in a soft voice, not intended to carry. “They sent their apologies, and one of them paid the cancellation fee—which was mighty nice of them, under the circumstances—but the harvests haven’t been as good as they’d been hoping when they booked with us, and they simply can’t afford to have us disrupting the town for a week. Not with autumn coming and the last of the stores needing to be brought in.”
“But the children—” she began, and stopped when she saw him shaking his head. “The children will be working, too.”
“Yes,” he said. “Farm children generally need to.”
“How can anyone farm out here?”
“How can anyone not?” He spread his arms, indicating the rolling plains around them. “There’s no supply train here, no one coming to make sure the pantry is stocked and the larder is full. It’s hunt and farm and hope and fail, and pray that failure won’t be enough to see you in the ground.”
There was a hard edge to his voice that made Annie want to step away from him, fearing the sound. “What does this mean for us?” she asked instead.
He sighed. “It means we press on. We have to find at least one more show before the end of the season, or we’re not going to make it through the winter.”
Winter was when the circus stopped, at least until the roads thawed. Winter was when they rented rooms from suspicious townies, or slept six to a wagon and hoped that their bodies would be enough to keep the air from freezing. It was when they stabled the animals and repaired the tents and pretended, for a time, to be comfortable under a fixed roof, surrounded by strangers who grew more familiar by the day. They lost a few people every winter, when the lure of town life was too much for them to resist. They gained a few people, too, riding out in the spring with formerly respectable merchants and seamstresses clinging to their bunks, eyes full of stars and bones full of wonder.
“Do we have a destination?”
Nathanial hesitated.
That was never a good sign. When Nathanial hesitated, it was because he knew that whatever he was going to say was not going to be well-received.
“Nathanial,” she said.
He sighed. “Oregon,” he said. “There’s a town there. The Clearing. They have a reputation for being kind to outsiders; I know a puppet show that passed through there last summer, and they made five times their normal fees, in addition to gifts from the locals.”
“So why are you wary?”
“Because anything that sounds too good to be true almost certainly is.” He looked moodily at the crowd around the chuck wagon. “I just don’t see where we have a choice.”
Chapter Four
Circus folk were contentious by nature: they would argue with almost anything, from their portion at supper to the orientation of the big tent’s entrance. It was no surprise that there had been several objections to Mr. Blackstone’s plan to take them into Oregon for their last show of the winter.
It had been more of a surprise when several of the roustabouts and smaller acts chose to stay behind rather than throwing their lot in with the circus.
“Bad things happen in Oregon,” said Adrianne, a knife-thrower, before she packed her bags and slipped off down the road.
“Last circus I was with said that they’d tried to go to The Clearing, and there were no roads, and there was no route on the map, and everyone they’d asked about it told them no one lived there,” said Vlad, a roustabout, before he put his hat on and walked away.
“People there have superstitions I can’t be having with,” said Edgar, his wife’s hand clutched firmly in his, their children arrayed behind them like the spokes on a wheel. “If you make it back this way, we’ll be happy to have our wagon back, Miss Pearl, but I’m not risking my children for a few extra potatoes in the pot.”
“But where will you go?”
Edgar shrugged. “Last town we passed through was nice enough to us, and they didn’t stare as much as some. Daisy’s lacework is good enough to pay for a room, and if I had to stay inside until winter, I’ve done more for less. Be careful out there, will you? Oregon’s too close to California for my liking, and much too close to the sea.”
“You be careful, too, Edgar,” she said. On an impulse, she leaned in and kissed his furry forehead. When she pulled back, she thought that he might be blushing beneath his lush brown coat.
Adeline stepped up to take her hand, and the two of them watched in silence as the dog-faced man and his family started down the road, carrying as many of their worldly goods on their backs as they could manage. They’d been forced to leave so much behind. There was no guarantee that any of the things they’d abandoned would still be there when the show came back this way. Annie could try to defend their wagon’s place in the freak show, but there were always bodies looking for a bunk, especially with the winter coming on, and once people moved into a space, it was hard to keep them out of the closets and the drawers.
“Damn,” breathed Annie. Adeline’s hand tightened on hers. She looked down into the wide, shocked eyes of her daughter, and grimaced. “I’m sorry, my dearest. I just worry about what they’re going to do with themselves, all alone like that. Circus folk look out for their own. They’re still ours. They’ll be ours until the day we die.”
Adeline pulled her hand out of her mother’s so she could sign, ‘Bad words aren’t right.’
“You know, when you say things like that, I question the wisdom of letting Andrew teach you how to sign. Lecturing me! Well I never.” Annie crouched and began tickling her daughter, fingers seeking out the most sensitive spots with an ease born from years of practice. Adeline giggled soundlessly, twisting and squirming, but never quite making an effort to get away.
A throat was cleared behind them. Annie stopped tickling as they both turned to find Mr. Blackstone standing on the path, his hands folded behind his back, watching the picture they presented.
“Are all your people aware of our planned route?” he asked. There was a formality in his voice that made it clear he was speaking in his capacity as head of the show and not as her sometime friend, or Adeline’s honorary uncle. So much about the circus was contextual. Sometimes Annie wondered how they could keep it all straight.
But they did. They had to. The show must go on. “They are,” she said, straightening. Adeline fell into place at her side, standing close enough that she was half-veiled by her mother’s skirts. “Edgar and his family are returning to our most recent stop. The snake-dancers are willing to perform but worry about the chill in Oregon; they’re asking for extra firewood to keep their serpents warm.”
br /> “And you?” he asked. “Will you be returning to our last town, or asking for favors?”
Something was gnawing at him. Annie straightened farther, tilting her chin up until her eyes were locked on his own, and said, “We are far closer to certain territories than I care to be. Anything that carries us farther is a lovely idea as far as I’m concerned. I hear Oregon is splendid in the fall. Now will you stop questioning me like I’m something you just found under a rock and tell me what troubles you?”
Nathanial hesitated. Then he crouched down, dipping one of his long-fingered, clever hands into the pocket of his waistcoat and coming up with a piece of polished quartz. It looked more like bone than stone. He offered it gravely to Adeline.
“Miss Cynthia dropped this on the path this morning. I believe it’s one of her lucky stones. Would you do me the immense favor of returning it to her? She’ll be so pleased to see it again that I expect she’ll have a reward for the one who returns it.”
Adeline took the stone, casting a hopeful glance up at her mother. Miss Cynthia had a reputation for hiding sugar candy in her wagon, enough that she had, on several occasions, attracted ants. It took an impressive amount of sugar to catch the attention of ants while in a moving wagon, but Miss Cynthia had managed it.
“Yes, go ahead,” said Annie. “Come straight back to the oddities wagon when you’re done. I’ll let you help me feed Tranquility.” The little girl was endlessly fascinated by the big cat. Annie still found it best not to leave them alone together.
Adeline nodded agreement and took off running, bare feet flashing under the hem of her skirt. Even at a dead sprint, she made no sound.