Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 125, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 763 & 764, March/April 2005

The Caravan of Wonders Lady by James Powell

James Powell seems to have at his fingertips an endless supply of fascinating but little-known facts. The “pig-faced woman” referred to in this new tale was a popular sideshow act in England in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, he tells us. Another of the story’s references is to the “Classic foot, which in William Blake’s apprentice etcher day was how feet were supposed to look.” In his story, it becomes the “Angelic foot.”

In 1859, after the birth of his colicky, leather-lunged son and namesake, Ambrose Ganelon, founder of San Sebastiano’s famous detective agency, began taking long late-night walks through the tiny principality.

Usually he kept to the city’s well-lit heart, for he found something sinister in gaslight, associating it with theater illuminations and pretense. As if he could fight all this falsity by staring it down, the detective’s steps often took him to the rue Babette arcade.

A few years back speculators had purchased several blocks of fine old apartment buildings there, gutted the interiors, and lowered the high ceilings, making three floors where two had been and three apartments where there had only been one, renting out these vast warrens to people who wanted a prestigious ad-dress behind a noble facade.

Then, inspired by the Crystal Palace in London and the souks of Libya, they had roofed over the streets before these buildings with iron and glass. Here the apartment dwellers came to escape their cramped quarters, strolling in slippers and with pipe to look in the shop windows or sitting in the cafes where they welcomed their friends as if into their own homes.

Ganelon shook his head over this confusion of indoors and out, of private and public, of day and night. At one time he thought the principality’s bright young men who walked their pet lobsters and tortoises on leashes there, each creature beneath its own little shell arcade, were mocking the scene.

Now he doubted they possessed such subtlety. Cardsharps used to fleece their marks by what was called glazing, where you sat your man down with a mirror behind him showing his cards. Eventually even the dullest of marks refused to sit anywhere near a mirror. But these young men walking their pets in the arcade wore the latest thing in men’s fashions, jackets with large silver buttons on whose surface the sharper could again read the mark’s cards. The style had come from Fong a la Mode, the Paris fashion house owned by Ganelon’s archrival, that master of pretense, the evil Dr. Ludwig Fong.

Ganelon suspected his seeing Fong behind everything was the onset of oboe madness, a common illness among players of woodwind instruments. When he mentioned this in his secret correspondence with the Mistress of Balmoral she told him the affliction was widespread in Scotland, where it was called “piper’s giddy,” and sent him a local nostrum for it which involved oatmeal and sheep tallow.

There were other evenings when Ganelon turned his back on the gaslight to walk through rougher neighborhoods still lit by sperm-whale oil lamps, which gave off a mellower light reminiscent of his childhood. These walks always ended at the Forest Gate and the customs booth of the rue Chenier, where taxes were collected on farm goods brought into the city each day.

Tonight, as Ganelon turned onto the rue Chenier, he discovered a man and woman ahead of him on the narrow sidewalk proceeding at a stately pace. Something about the couple drew the detective’s attention.

Ganelon placed the man in his mid forties, his clothes modest but well cared for, his shoes polished and not down-at-the-heels. This last observation proved little, however, since Fong Novelties of Essen introduced its patented heel that could be rotated to conceal wear. The only thing exceptional about the man was his tan bowler hat, a color, Ganelon understood, popular for seashore wear in England, where the salt air gave black bowlers a greenish tint.

The woman wore a long snuff-colored surtout reaching to the ground and a brimmed rice-straw hat with a veil so heavy a beekeeper would have envied it. Stockier and stoop-shouldered, she was taller than the man by a good inch. Though her companion held her by the elbow, she seemed to be setting the pace.

As he speculated, the couple abruptly swung around and came toward him. Caught off guard, Ganelon quickly stepped from the sidewalk to let them by, tipping his hat as he did.

The man solemnly returned the compliment as they passed. A pace or two later the woman turned back to look at the detective for a moment through her veil.

The set of the woman’s shoulders and the cock of her head as she did touched a dim corner of Ganelon’s memory, something too distant to be recalled. He stood watching in the gutter until the couple reached the corner and disappeared from sight.

And here was another thing. As they passed, Ganelon had been surprised by a familiar odor. The man smelled of eau de Tancredi, a toilet water concocted by the monks of Cologne especially for San Sebastiano’s royal house. As a privy counselor to Prince Conrad, Ganelon received a bottle of eau de Tancredi each Christmas. But how had this man come by his?

The answer to the riddle of the toilet water came that very next morning when Prince Conrad sent for Ganelon, a not unexpected summons. For several weeks now the newspapers had been filled with stories about Prince Conrad’s son, Prince Charles (Charlot Bon-Vivant or Good-Time Charlie, as he was popularly known) and his love of the moment, the spirited and tawny-haired ballerina Editha Simonova. The prince often sought Ganelon’s advice on matters connected with Charlot’s romantic liaisons.

Simonova had arrived two months ago with the Kiev Ballet to dance Nino Briquet’s ballet The Man in the Iron Boot at the Theatre Royale. (The House of Tancredi had been founded by Sixto the Sinister, whose name inspired the story of an extra toe on the Tancredis’ left feet. The ballet retold a fifteenth-century legend that a Tancredi prince believed killed at the Battle of Lepanto returned home to reclaim the throne only to be thrown into the Chateau Gai prison by his usurping younger brother, who placed an iron boot on the captive’s left foot to conceal the telltale toe.)

Ganelon entered the palace by a rear entrance. When Charlot’s romances heated up, an artist from La Presse Illustree often lurked near the main entrance armed with a boxwood block and a pencil to sketch Ganelon’s arrival, which would appear as a woodcut in the next issue.

As a chamberlain escorted him up the servants’ staircase to the prince’s apartment they passed the very man Ganelon had seen on the street the night before, coming down the stairs carrying a leather satchel. The chamberlain turned back to say, “Gordon, I hope you haven’t forgotten our rehearsal this morning at eleven.” In a quiet but firm voice the man assured him he had not.

When Ganelon raised an inquiring eyebrow the chamberlain informed him that Gordon Stevens was the prince’s new English barber. “His highness is pleased with him. The man is discretion itself. And his trumpet will be a valuable addition to the household orchestra.”

“Have you met his wife?” the detective ventured.

The chamberlain looked away. “Does he have one?” he asked. “Gordon declined accommodations here which go with his position. I thought he might be living with a woman to whom he is not married.”

Ganelon found Prince Conrad, his chin clean-shaven and his blond dundreary whiskers smelling of eau de Tancredi, sitting regally in an armchair at his desk. Standing next to him was Baron Marcel Bollard, wearing an ancient hat resembling a thick pancake decorated with a peacock feather and a long blue cape emblazoned with a winged snail in gold.

“You know our Dean of the College of Arms, of course,” said the prince.

Ganelon suspected that Baron Bollard, a man quite undistinguished in every way except for his sallow gooseberry complexion, had gone into the field of heraldry because he thought the regalia might give him some dash. The detective bowed. “Good morning, Eminent Slime Dragon Volant,” he said. Calling the baron by his official title never failed to make the man flinch. The Flying Snail, or Great Worm of the Maxima, figured prominently in San Sebastiano’s folklore.

A democrat, Ganelon had little interest in ancestry or the cluttered quartering of arms or where the Eagle of Prussia roosted, the Lion of Brunswick roared, the Towers of Braganza stood or where the Lilies of the Bourbons and the Cabbage Roses of the Tancredis bloomed.

“I see that Your Highness has other business to discuss,” said Baron Bollard. “I will withdraw. I am sorry the Almanac de Gotha could be of no help in this matter.” The man took his leave in a swirl of emblazoned cape.

“Are you aware of Charlot’s love of the moment?” the prince asked the detective when they were alone. Ganelon nodded and the prince opened a desk drawer and took out a satin ballet slipper. “Charlot showed me this,” he said. “He called it a love token from his Editha.”

Ganelon examined the slipper and looked inside. It was said that no two ballet slippers are the same, each dancer inserting the wadding to make themselves most comfortable. Editha’s foot was most unusual.

“See how the second toe is more prominent than the big toe?” asked the Prince. “Do you recognize the Angelic foot?”

Ganelon nodded. He knew the story. In the sixth century two young English princes had visited Rome as an adventure, disguised as slaves. Struck by their beauty, Pope Gregory the Great asked where they came from. Not Angli but angeli, he had insisted. His words were not lost on Rome’s artistic community. From that day forward the English visitors’ form, face, and feet became the standard for angels and holy men in chapel ceilings and cathedral frescoes. In fact, Ganelon owned an engraving by the English artist and poet William Blake, “Joseph of Arimathaea among the Rocks of Albion,” which displayed quite clearly the Angelic foot.

“That slipper got me thinking,” said the prince. “What if Editha were of English royal blood? After all, opera singers take on Italian stage names. Why shouldn’t a ballerina take a Russian one? Editha sounds more English than Russian.” He stroked his whiskers thoughtfully. “I mean, wouldn’t that be wonderful?”

Ganelon grunted. He knew Charlot got his way with women by offering marriage, secure his father would forbid the wedding because they were not of royal blood.

The prince closed his eyes, and his face took on a dreamy expression. “When heads of state gather, we Tancredis are always seated with the petty potentates, never at the head table with the kings and queens, the presidents and prime ministers. But if Editha has English royal blood, that could all change.”

The prince opened his eyes. “Look into this matter for us, Ambrose. If my boy runs true to form, in a week or two he’ll propose. This time, when he comes to tell me, he may be in for a big surprise.” The prince turned dreamy again. Then he saw that Ganelon was watching and he cleared his throat and added a quick, “It’s high time the boy settles down and starts a family.”

When Ganelon left the palace, he went directly to the commissariat of police to check the information Editha Simonova gave the authorities on entering the country. As he headed toward the record office, he passed the gaunt figure of Police Commissioner Medocq. They did not exchange greetings. Ganelon had to smile. Medocq reminded him of a court fool named Captain Cloux who died of the sullens because his royal master brought another fool to court. Rather than a fool, Ganelon saw himself as a guardian angel to the House of Tancredi, whose princes all had a large dash of the simpleton in their composition.

At the records office, he handed in the ballerina’s name and, as an afterthought, that of Stevens the barber as well. The dusty old clerk dottered away, returned in a moment with the ballerina’s card. Ganelon sat down with it at a table by the window.

Name, Editha Simonova; place of birth, Kiev; nationality, Russian. No reason to read any further. That seemed to settle the matter once and for all. Ganelon sat in thought for a few moments. He was about to rise and return to the palace with the bad news when the old clerk, looking even dustier than before, came over to lay a faded folder in front of him.

Ganelon opened it to find Gordon Stevens’s fresh white entry card. Place of birth, London; nationality, British subject; marital status, single. Behind the form were several yellowing items from an older, more suspicious time when the forces of reaction saw treachery at every turn and policemen like then Sergeant Medocq had to scrutinize anything out of the ordinary. And what was more unusual than a traveling sideshow called the Caravan of Wonders?

Unfolding the show’s fragile handbill, Ganelon was suddenly transported back to his boyhood, when he made his living running errands for out-of-town merchants who knew him from his days as a pot boy at the Sign of the Saracen Dog before the authorities closed the place down.

One Sunday long ago, young Ganelon had gone to this very show. He read down the acts remembering: the mathematical goat, a sad-faced creature who did sums and multiplication; a parrot who sang “God Save the King” and told fortunes; and Little Boy Blue, the Welsh trumpet prodigy who played the instrument wearing nothing but a loincloth and blue body dye. Here Ganelon followed a police notation in a spidery hand and rusty ink in the margin to the entry declaration of Thomas Stevens, British subject, owner of the Caravan of Wonders, who declared Gordon to be his son.

On the bottom of this form the police wondered if the father might be connected with a family of English smugglers of the same name. They also suspected the boy to be a midget, an operative of the High Woad, the Secret Council of Welsh terrorists fighting for independence from England.

Ganelon returned to the handbill. He remembered the next act, the Persian ropedancers. He had expected tightrope performers, not a pair of turbaned dervishes who smoked hemp and then danced around in a circle going faster and faster with larger and larger grins on their faces. Could they be Jangalis, the police wondered, a tribe of Persian assassins working to overthrow the Shah?

The next attraction on the handbill was Madam Stevens, the Pig-Faced Lady. She was an extra. To see “Madam at Table” Ganelon paid another sou and stood on tiptoe at the peephole. Inside, by the light of a dim oil lamp, he saw a large woman in a marmalade wig, sitting bent over a table eating cream-filled cakes with clumsy, gloved fingers. She wore a checked dress whose short sleeves revealed arms bare to above the elbow. The woman’s profile was hideous and snouted, her skin’s pallor accentuated by a cheek and lip rouge as red as radishes.

Suddenly, as if sensing the boy’s gaze, Madam Stevens turned full round and faced the peephole with the weariest and saddest eyes young Ganelon had ever seen. Ganelon remembered the boy thinking as he turned from the peephole how sad it must be to have a face so ugly. How could she ever find a husband or earn a living except by putting herself on public display?

What surprised him now was how the hopeless set of Madam Stevens’s shoulders and the cock of her head mirrored the gesture of the veiled woman on the street the night before.

Ganelon glanced back at the barber’s entry card. Pinned to it was the required statement from Stevens’s landlord declaring he was indeed renting an apartment to Stevens and his sister. Sister? Ganelon checked back through the contents of the folder. He found no entry card for a sister. Was she married? Had she filled out the card under another name?

This reminded Ganelon that there had been no entry card for Madam Stevens, the Pig-Faced Lady, in the old file. He tugged at his lower lip thoughtfully before jotting down the barber’s address.

After lunch Ganelon went to where the barber lived, an old building in an even older section of town. The third-floor apartment was up a dusty staircase with a rope banister. He knocked on the door and waited, thinking he heard someone moving around inside. But no one came. He knocked again, placed his ear against the door, and had the distinct impression that another ear lay against the wood on the other side, listening.

Then he heard a step on the stairs and turned to find Stevens the barber carrying his leather satchel in one hand and a trumpet case under his arm. “May I help you?” asked the man frostily, having caught Ganelon listening at his door.

The detective introduced himself, was pleased when the man recognized his name, and added, “I had the pleasure of hearing you play the trumpet when you appeared here with the Caravan of Wonders many, many years ago, you and your mother.”

The noise inside the apartment had grown louder, as though whoever it was had recognized the barber’s voice.

“I am something of a musician myself,” continued Ganelon. “I thought I’d drop by and pay my respects.” Here he stopped and waited, letting the silence grow awkward.

After some consideration Stevens relaxed, bowed, and said, “Thank you. Of course, you must come in. But would you oblige me by waiting here for a moment?” He quickly unlocked the door, opened it narrowly, and slipped inside. Ganelon could hear his voice and then the sound of a door closing within the apartment. Then the apologetic barber reappeared, opened the door wide, and ushered the detective inside.

Rooms rented furnished are all the same. The only unusual thing was the wall mirror covered with a black cloth. Stevens offered the detective a chair at a table with a map of Italy spread out on it and sat down across from him.

“I hope your mother is well,” said Ganelon, nodding tentatively at the bedroom door.

“My mother died when I was born,” said the barber.

Ganelon blinked. “Your stepmother, then. The woman I saw with the Caravan of Wonders.”

“Perhaps I should explain,” began Stevens. But here the hastily latched bedroom door sprang open and the Pig-Faced Lady of Ganelon’s childhood staggered into the room. The detective rose instinctively.

The rouged cheeks, the snout as red as radishes — it was Madam Stevens or her double. She wore a simple housedress and list slippers. Then Ganelon saw her clawed hands and the sturdy legs thick with dark brown hair.

For Ganelon, this was the ultimate pretense in a world that less and less rang true! The Pig-Faced Lady was not a woman. She was a bear.

The creature looked at Ganelon with the same sad, helpless eyes he had seen through the peephole thirty years before, rooting the astonished detective to the spot. Before he could recover himself, Stevens had cupped his hand under the bear’s elbow and, speaking in a soothing tone, he turned the animal around and led her back into the room. He closed the door with a firm snap of the latch.

By now, Ganelon was livid with indignation. “This is an outrage,” he said, so beside himself he could barely utter the words. “What kind of man are you? What have you done to this poor creature? You are about to discover we have laws in San Sebastiano against the mistreatment of animals.”

Stevens heard him out without batting an eye until the detective paused for breath. Then the barber said in his own defense, “My people were Bruinists, a Puritan sect. Perhaps you’ve heard of us.”

Ganelon shook his head decisively, as if to deny such people existed.

Stevens continued, “They were Puritans, but not of the sort Macaulay recently described who hated bearbaiting because it gave pleasure to the spectators, not because it gave pain to the bear. No, the Bruinists believed that setting dogs upon a bear for sport was an abomination in the eyes of God. They actively opposed the practice, coming in the night to free bears captured for that purpose and releasing them back into the wild. For this they were much persecuted as common thieves by King, Protector, and Parliament.”

“I would have thought the wild would be in short supply in England,” ventured Ganelon.

“Correct,” said Stevens. “Most were smuggled abroad. Fortunately, my great-grandfather, an itinerant barber, discovered that beneath the fur a bear’s skin is as white as yours or mine. Faces and arms shaved, they bore a passing resemblance to humans. Dressing them up in cloaks and hats, my people spirited them out of the country, claiming the bears were the sons of noblemen whom they were taking abroad to complete their educations.

“In recent years, as bearbaiting fell out of favor, we found we could buy the bears from their owners. But years of persecution had impoverished us. So my father came up with the Caravan of Wonders as a way to finance our mission, the purchase and transportation of bears to wildernesses on the Continent.

“The Madam Stevens you saw, the Pig-Faced Lady, was a bear tied to a chair and eating at a table in middling light. We called her ‘Mother.’ That was just our joke. Not a cruel one, I hope. Poor Mother, we tried to explain it to her but she never really understood that she was helping us free her kind. At first, her shaven face horrified her. Later she would be horrified if we left her unshaven.” The tailor pointed to the wall mirror. “So we never let her see her reflection.”

Ganelon frowned. “But that was thirty years ago. Beyond a bear’s lifespan. She should be long dead.”

“That was Mother,” said the barber. He nodded toward the bedroom door. “This is Sister. And that is another story. You see, after the Caravan of Wonders left San Sebastiano we toured Europe for several years, sending money back to England to buy the freedom of other bears. But then the show fell on hard times. I had become a bit long in the tooth for a trumpet prodigy and the ropedancers were smoking more and dancing less. They took off with the parrot and the mathematical goat in lieu of wages due the night we reached Kiev.”

“Kiev?” asked Ganelon, his interest in the narrative quickening.

“Yes, and that was a stroke of luck for us,” said the barber. “The very next day we got word that England had outlawed bearbaiting and the last captive bear had been ransomed. All we had to do was release Mother into the wilderness which stood at our doorstep and our Bruinist work would be done. So we dressed her up in her finest, walked her several miles into the woods, and left Mother there with her favorite spice cake, telling her we’d be back soon.

“Our plan was to start for England that very night. But then Father had a brainstorm. You see, my skin still had a blue cast from the dye from my Little Boy Blue act. Father thought we could make some quick traveling money by advertising me as the World’s Oldest Consumptive Trumpet Prodigy on His Final Concert Tour.

“Well, Kiev flocked to see me, hoping, no doubt, that I’d die in mid trumpet cadenza. So we decided to rent a theater on the Boulevard des Anglais and settled in for an extended run of the show. We ate nightly at Smith’s Chop House and rented space to keep our caravan behind the Bristol Hotel.”

“Sounds like Kiev had a large English colony.”

“I’ll say,” laughed the barber. “In fact, there was a jolly little song making the rounds in the music halls, ‘Oh, To Be in England Now That England’s Here.’ I think Mr. Browning paraphrased from it for one of his poems.

“Anyway, on our last night in Kiev we heard a scratching on the caravan door. It was Mother, her clothes all in tatters and desperate for a shave. Somehow she’d found her way back to us. But she was so shaken by the experience, we knew we could never release her into the wild again. So we had to find Sant’Ursula Maggiore.”

“And just what was that?”

“A nunnery operated by the Poor Clares,” explained Stevens. “You see, in the very beginning, the Bruinists had an understanding with the Franciscan friars, who took the animals from us at Calais. The males they dressed in monks’ robes, guided them to some wilderness, blessed them, and let them go. The Poor Clares took the females to this secret nunnery somewhere in Italy and cared for them until they died. But many years ago, this arrangement broke down in an argument over some minor theological point or other. It now became my father’s dream to find the place and leave Mother there.

“So I trumpeted our way back across Europe. That next spring, to our surprise, Mother gave birth to a little cub and died of natural causes a few months later. Father dropped me off to study at the Paris Barber College and headed for Italy with Sister, as we’d named the cub. He searched for two years and never found the nunnery. Then he and Sister returned to Paris, where he died.”

Stevens tapped the map on the table. “Now my father’s dream is mine,” he said. “I barber to royalty until I’ve enough money to continue the search. Then Sister and I will set out for Italy. One day, in a town in some valley or in a village stuck on some mountainside, we will turn a corner and there it will be, Sant’Ursula Maggiore. I will ring the bell at the entrance. A nun will appear and take Sister’s arm and lead her inside. And Sister will understand and go without a backward look. Then my mission will be done and my own life can begin.”

Ganelon stood before his office wall map of Europe and Asia, where pushpins represented the detective agency’s scattered operatives. The one in the Caspian region was the closest at hand. Ganelon had sent him to investigate the activities of a Fong henchman who, Ganelon suspected, meant to kill off the world’s ruling classes by poisoning Russia’s finest caviar. (The henchman’s subsequent arrest would be described in lurid detail in one of Austin Marchpane’s Ganelon adventure stories, The Astrakhan Collar.) Ganelon moved the operative’s pushpin to Kiev. Then he set off to the telegraphic office to instruct the man to follow the pin.

As Ganelon crossed the street, a carriage passed with a bright new crest on the door. He thought he smelled fresh paint and shook his head once more at the times he lived in. Nowadays, two noble families of limited means might club together to buy a carriage with an extra set of doors, paint on their crests, and use the carriage on alternate days. Ganelon snorted. The next thing you knew, tailors would be offering suits with two pairs of pants.

But the crest on the door prompted Ganelon to stop at the College of Arms on his way. The more obscure their lore, the closer monomaniacs kept in touch. Things would go faster in Kiev if the Eminent Slime Dragon Volant contacted his opposite number for the ancient Duchy of Kiev with a request for cooperation.

Baron Bollard wrote out the message to his colleague, the Great Horned Bat of the Near Caves and the Far, and gave it to the detective to send. The Dean of the College of Arms was so obliging that Ganelon knew he would never again be able to call the man by his hereditary title just to make him flinch.

Five days later, Ganelon’s agent was back in San Sebastiano, having met with Baron Bollard’s opposite number. Apparently English royal families had been seeking refuge in Kiev for centuries, beginning with Ethelred the Unready’s children fleeing King Canute and his Danes. Kiev’s Yaroslav the Wise made them so welcome that the heirs of Harold Hawk-in-Hand fled there, too, after the Battle of Hastings. During the Wars of the Roses, Kiev served as a refuge for English royalty. In fact, locally, the Angelic foot was called the Dnieper foot.

The Great Horned Bat of the Near Caves and the Far even provided a grove of family trees establishing Editha’s claim to English royal blood.

Ganelon hurried with all this information to the palace. He found Prince Conrad suffering from the gout — or crystal arthritis, as some called it, because the uric acid in the blood crystallizes and seeks out the joints of the foot. He sat with a downcast expression on his face and his left foot propped on an ottoman.

Ganelon hoped the news from Kiev would cheer him up. “Allow Charlot and Editha to marry,” he concluded, “and you’ll certainly be sitting among kings and queens and presidents and prime ministers.”

Prince Conrad uttered a deep sigh and shook his head. “That’s ancient history,” he said. “My boy proposed to the ballerina. She refused him. Apparently Tancredi blood is not good enough for her.”

To change the subject, the prince nodded toward his propped-up foot. “By the way, I told you once that it hums. Then I told you it crackled like twigs burning. Now, at night, it sounds like someone blowing through a crude musical instrument. Like this.” Prince Conrad made his hands into a hollow ball and blew into it. Then he looked inquiringly at Ganelon.

The detective shook his head. But in fact he did recognize the sound. The prince was imitating the Australian native instrument the didgeridoo. In the same moment, Ganelon remembered reading somewhere that the aborigines down under believed crystals could be used for long-distance communication. At the time, he had scoffed at the idea as absurd. Now he wasn’t sure. Had Prince Conrad’s gouty, six-toed foot become some kind of a wireless telegraphic receiving device?

Ganelon felt an attack of piper’s giddy coming on. He excused himself and hurried home to rub oatmeal and sheep tallow into his temples.

Copyright ©; 2005 by James Powell.