The Book of Speculation

20

Seer vanished. Possibly deceased. Reconfiguration requires additional sojourn in Burlington. It was difficult to encompass the depth of guilt Peabody felt at Ryzhkova’s departure, if only for the effect that it had on Amos.

Reluctant to leave it, her cart became Amos’s home. He had no wish to spend his days with Peabody, who wore pity like one of his waistcoats. Worst of all was sleep. Amos’s dreams overflowed with visions of Ryzhkova and her cards.

Having given up the search, they departed Burlington, passing the day in mud, rocks, wagon ruts, and loneliness. That night he simply held Evangeline. In the morning she moved all her possessions into the wagon with Amos. When Evangeline’s arms could not comfort him, Amos concentrated on the trace musk of burned sage, and imagined Ryzhkova haggling pay with Peabody or discussing stitch work with Susanna. Gradually he grew to understand the Three of Swords’s pierced heart; Ryzhkova had broken him.

He spent more of his days with Sugar Nip, content to pass hours with a creature who didn’t care whether he spoke or worked, or mourned. Kindness and food were Sugar Nip’s currency, one he deeply understood. On a late evening, Amos went to the small horse’s wagon to feed her wild onions, and found Benno already inside and scratching Sugar Nip’s forelock. Startled, Amos nearly fell from the door, but Benno steadied him.

“Apologies, I did not mean to frighten. I was hoping to speak with you. Something weighs heavily upon me, something perhaps I should have told you.” His voice was a whisper, and his eyes glinted in the shadows.

Sugar Nip snorted and stamped uneasily. Amos fed her the onions and crouched beside Benno, tilting his head in question.

“I saw something I believe I was not meant to. Evangeline. Before Madame Ryzhkova left, I witnessed them quarrel. I thought little of it at the time, but then Ryzhkova departed and I began to wonder.”

Amos started.

“I say this out of care, and because you have been kind to me. Did you never wonder where Evangeline came from before she found us? She worries me. You know me now; I’ve shown you what I was. You trust me, I think. Can you say the same of her?” He put his hand on Amos’s shoulder as if to steady him once more.

Amos felt bile rise. He spat into the straw.

Benno slid forward, poised on the lip of the door. “I think sometimes it is difficult to look after ourselves,” he said, thoughtfully. “We look to friends to do it for us. But perhaps I am mistaken. I thought only to warn you and, selfishly, to ease my mind. I’ve done so. I ask only that you think on why she drowns herself.” He rubbed his thumb over a scratched knuckle on his left hand. “And why Ryzhkova would leave.” Benno hopped down, and left Amos to his thoughts.

It was an hour before Amos felt right enough to leave the wagon.

Peabody granted Amos an amount of time to sort himself out, but after two towns with Amos doing little more than cleaning up after the animals, Peabody pulled him aside. “Work, Amos.” He sat Amos down by the accounts table and mussed his hair, which without the benefit of a head scarf had started to mat.

“Idleness is our enemy and never did fill a man’s purse.” At Amos’s puzzled expression, he added, “Money has a way of changing one’s outlook. We shall find you something. Enterprise, my boy. Nothing leavens the spirit like enterprise.” Beneath the shade of his hat, Peabody’s eyes were tired. Amos knew what would come.

The Wild Boy cage reappeared. Evangeline stood beside him when the velvet curtain was drawn back from the bars. She had only known Amos as the fortune-teller; he’d preferred it that way. He pulled his arm from hers.

Peabody touched a glove to the boy’s shoulder. “For the moment, until we are able to confabulate a vocation for you.”

“Is there truly nothing else?” Evangeline asked.

“Your water act is hardly fit for two,” Peabody coughed. “As it were Amos remains a Wild Boy without compare. He was glorious. It may be enlightening for you to see him at the height of his powers. Quite the thing.”

But desperation made the act fearsome. Women screamed and fainted more than they had before, and the troupe began to give Amos a wide berth. Money came as Peabody had promised, though the draw was less. “The joy has gone,” Peabody said after the closing of a lean show. “The showmanship, my fine fellow, is not what it could be.”

Amos agreed. Vanishing was the only part of the act that was tolerable. When he let his body listen to the breath of the world and fade away, in those precious moments the ache left him; it returned in the dark, when he held Evangeline tightly and remembered Benno’s words.

After Amos was pelted with rotted fruit in Wellston, Peabody spoke to him while still in the cage. Amos drew a shirt over his head to cover his nakedness. Things that had once been delightful — the cold iron bars, the straw against his skin — were now irksome; he missed the intimate work of a seer, and the privacy. He missed the language he used with his teacher, and being looked at without fear. Peabody sat beside him, an air of sorrow about him, unmindful of the sawdust and dirt that clung to his clothing. “I miss her as well. I find there is an emptiness.” He tapped his chest near his heart. “Madame Ryzhkova had an excellent presence about her. But,” he punctuated, pointing to the cage ceiling, “move on, we must.”

Amos grimaced, but nodded. Everything about Peabody always seemed ready to burst, whereas his own insides seemed to be forever shrinking. He touched his cheek to Peabody’s shoulder, then removed himself from the wagon, through the trapdoor, as he had when he’d been a child.

That night he buried his face in Evangeline’s hair and she held him, knowing she had driven Ryzhkova off as surely as she’d murdered her grandmother.

* * *

Evangeline’s stomach began to round. They did not speak of it until it could not be ignored.

* * *

“You must teach me,” she said to Amos as they traveled south. She rested her head against his shirtsleeve. In one hand he held the reins of the horse pulling their wagon; with the other he traced Evangeline’s neck. At her question his eyes strayed from the road.

“To read the tarot,” she said. “We would make a handsome pair.”

A wheel sent a stone spinning off into the brush. Roads were never easy except in more worn places outside of New York and Philadelphia, but Amos noted every pit and root now that each bump jostled the swell of Evangeline’s belly. He shook his head. Ryzhkova lived in the cards, the last touches of her that he could not bring himself to clear away. Each time he held them he felt a bit of her old humor, the brush of her crooked thumb on his hand. They were too private to work with, too dear.

“Watching you play savage is unbearable.” Evangeline shifted and began to search through the deck nestled between them on the seat board. “It isn’t you. Perhaps when you were a boy, but not now. It’s watching you dying,” she said, showing him a card with an impaled man. “It kills me, too.”

He looked back to the road, thinking of the things he’d meant to tell her: that he’d dreamt of leaving with her; that he wished to build them a house — have chickens, perhaps a dog, as he’d always liked them. He feared, too, that just as she had come in the night she would one day leave him. Perhaps it would be best if, like Peabody, they continued to move. He’d thought many times over Benno’s words, but did not tell her of it. He could not ask her of her past, not when he knew nothing of his own.

Evangeline tapped the cards together and smacked them against Amos’s leg, demanding an answer.

He pulled back on the braided leather, causing the horse to trip to a halt, and skated his fingers through the deck. Ahead, the yellow door of Benno’s wagon disappeared into the trees. For a moment he thought to pair the card with another, but a tingling in his spine told him the one would be enough. He pressed Strength into Evangeline’s palm.

She contemplated before saying, “I cannot swim much longer. Few will want to see the Atlantis Mermaid and her enormous stomach.”

He squeezed her hand, pressing the card between them, heating it.

“Peabody has said as much. I must find other work during my confinement else my employ will end.”

Amos swallowed. Peabody could not afford to lose two incomes in a season, and there would be another mouth to feed. He snapped the reins. The horse protested but began to move.

“It would be good to work with something that does not pain you,” she said softly. “I think you wouldn’t miss the shrieking and the stares, or the insects and the rain.” She brushed an angry mosquito welt on Amos’s wrist, and his flesh leaned into the scratching. “You looked well before. A fine man who I would like to see again.”

He heard the longing in her voice and remembered how women sighed during card readings; Ryzhkova had said it was the sound of a spirit breaking.

“I believe I would take to it. I confess that I sometimes grow tired of water. It wears at me, like a river does its banks.”

He nodded, but his face grew grim. Their language had been one of double meanings, a weakness of the cards. In giving her Strength, he’d hoped she might see it as comfort, that he would protect her. Abide and all will be well; he would learn to be happier, to take care of her. But she was breaking, and in so had sought an older meaning, one unique to them, from when he had knelt and placed his head in her hands, lion acquiescing to lady.

The wheels bounced and Evangeline tumbled toward the edge of the seat board. Amos caught her and pulled her to his side. Evangeline snuggled into the crook of his arm. After a time, her eyelids drifted closed, light blue veins showing through her skin. He would teach her tarot, if only to keep her with him. On a not-too-distant night they would come to the lesson that had brought him to Evangeline but had cost him Ryzhkova. A knot formed under his ribs. He dreaded the day when, sitting in Ryzhkova’s wagon, he would teach her how to lie.