The Book of Speculation

8

The heart of an aquatic act is torture — to drown without drowning — but Evangeline tolerated it. When the mute young man brought her before Hermelius Peabody, she knew it would not be without consequences, but the young man’s eyes had been so warm that when he took her hand she followed.

Used to the plain dress and people of Krommeskill, Evangeline found Peabody’s manner and appearance shocking. She could not decide on which thing to stare at — his excessive attire, the garish wagon interior, or the young man whose hair was bound in purple cloth so dark it bordered on black.

“We are fortuitous! A stunning specimen, aren’t you?” Peabody burred and rolled. He surveyed her from tip to toe, and under this perusal her feet felt rooted to the floorboards. In the back of the wagon, the young man sat on a clever little bed that unfolded from a wall. His gaze tracked her too, but she found it reassuring.

“Evangeline, you say? A refined sounding name. Yes, you’ll keep it.” He jabbed the end of a quill against a leather-bound book before inclining his head toward the wagon’s other occupant. “You’ve already met our Amos.”

“I have.”

The older man paced, a feat that required him to crouch slightly and caused his velvet-clad elbow to brush her arm. “You have the look of someone who has been running.”

“No, sir,” she replied.

“Pish. You’re a terrible liar.” He laughed, bouncing his stomach. “Even I have run from time to time. Have you any family?”

“None to speak of.”

A grin peeked from under his moustache. “Excellent. We are all orphans here. Take this fine young man.” He gestured toward Amos. “No relations at all. Mute as well, poor lad. Myself? My own mother is many years gone, may the Blessed Lord keep her.” He executed a practiced flourish.

So, the young man was a mute. She remembered his touch as being kind, his palms rough as a farmhand’s. He watched with passive curiosity.

“And what do you do, my dear?” Peabody asked.

“Do?”

“We all must do something. While it would be lovely to have you, we are, to state it crudely, a business.” His tongue lingered on the word. “Each must pull his weight. Myself,” he drawled, “I run the day-to-day, plan the routes, speak when speaking is needed, and manage what profits we might have. Amos is our fortune-teller’s apprentice and occasional Wild Man.”

A flush crept across the silent face. Amos’s eyes flicked to his bare, dirt-covered feet.

“Though I am charitable, it is beyond my capabilities to take on one without earning potential. And so, lovely child, what is it that you do?”

I kill. I am a killer. She bit her lip and thought of what Grandmother Visser said about her long-ago baptism, what she had discovered in the river’s cold heart. “I hold my breath. What I mean to say is that I swim.”

A white eyebrow arched beneath the brim of a curled hat. “Many swim.”

“To be precise, sir, I cannot be drowned.”

A twitch of a smile. “Excellent.” He marked something down in a book. “Good that you are pretty,” he murmured. “Undrownable Beauty, a mermaid — most wonderful. Very well, the young man will help see to your arrangements. We cannot simply turn you away.”

Well into the night, Peabody sketched the myriad ways to display a mermaid. It would not do to have her simply hold her breath; he’d require a vessel that held a good amount of water, but was small enough for transport — a variation on a hogshead barrel, though comparatively squat, and not as large as the casks used in fermenting wine. He fancied it should be able to be taken apart, hoops and staves collapsed, in case the girl was not what she promised. He scribbled until his last candle left him in darkness.

After a private juggling exhibition by Melina helped negotiate a favorable price, Peabody enlisted the services of a Scottish cooper in Tarrytown. The completed tub was simple. It was a pretty piece of work with hammer-marked hoops around perfectly locked staves, wide to hold enough water to swim, yet low enough that a standing man could see into its depths.

While camped and waiting for the tub’s completion, Peabody had Benno set to work on building a series of small benches that could hold a group of ten. With Amos’s help, Benno repurposed costume trunks and a washtub to make sturdy risers.

During an afternoon of hammering and cobbling, Benno remarked in passing, “The mermaid girl is quite striking. I have seen you looking at her.”

Amos nodded. Curls of wood peeled away as Benno chiseled a joint.

“Not near as comely as Melina, but pretty.”

Amos braced a board and tilted his head. He’d hardly spared a thought for Melina since Evangeline had arrived.

“You are hopeful she will remain with us.”

A knot tied itself in Amos’s chest, an emotion he had no name for. He shrugged.

“Best not pine until we see how long she means to stay. Susanna, though. Think how she bends!”

Amos kept his eyes on the board, unwilling to answer his friend. Not thinking on Evangeline was impossible.

The tub was filled a bucket at a time by the troupe save for Peabody and Madame Ryzhkova, whose hands and back would not bear the work. Peabody oversaw the labor, delegating and directing, while he honed what would become Evangeline’s introduction.

She was a mermaid from long-sunk Atlantis, a miracle of mystic seas and secrets. In an unusual splurge, Peabody commissioned a sign painter to create placards depicting Evangeline with a long tail fin.

She expressed concern that people would be upset that she possessed no such appendage. Peabody replied, “You are beautiful. All else matters little, so long as you hold your breath and perform aquatic feats.” He insisted she wear a white gown that billowed around her when she descended into the tub.

The first part was painless, swimming tricks mostly, her backstroke was made sinuous by the lines of the wet gown and her blue-black hair. As she paused to smile and wave Peabody would ramble about the mysteries of her origin. Then he slashed the air, slapped the tub, and bellowed, “Dive!”

She pushed out her breath and sank to the bottom of the tub, her skirts trailing above while Peabody talked, his voice vibrating through the water. He encouraged the audience to count if they could and began a long, dark monologue.

“Tortures and horrors of the deep, fine ladies and gentle souls. This poor creature, this slip of a girl, she braves them! And would you survive?” Here he pointed a finger to the smallest boy in the crowd. “Fine lad, would you survive?”

Beneath the surface Evangeline was alone with the water and fear. When she closed her eyes, she imagined Grandmother Visser’s bruised lips asking why she’d done it. As the water pressed against her stomach and rib cage, caressing her, it felt like her grandmother’s hands, her voice, begging. Please.

Eternities after the act’s start, Peabody rapped his hand against the side of the tub, signaling Evangeline to rise. She spread her arms so that her sleeves hung like wings, and floated up, the crown of her head breaking the surface, then her eyes, slowly opening. She smiled the showman’s smile Peabody had taught her. Once her shoulders were above the water, she breathed. When she filled her lungs, the dress clung so that she rose like a Venus from the waves. At first the men’s leers brought shame, but routine blunted its bite.

Two pairs of eyes always watched her; one belonged to a scarred man, the other to a silent one.

When they traveled the mud roads between towns the tub doubled as her bed; turned on its side and lined with a straw mattress it made suitable shelter, and an oilcloth over the front kept out wind and rain, affording her a small amount of privacy. She fastened hooks to the outside of the staves for a curtain Melina had given her, and fashioned the tub into an intimate sort of room.

Though she did not mean to, she found herself watching the mute fortune-teller. He had a fascinating animal quickness and was helpful to a fault, but she often caught him staring. His eyes would flit away, but something about him left her feeling exposed, as if he knew her secret. He would bring her blankets to cover places where stiff straw poked through her mattress and made sure cracks in the tub were properly sealed with pitch, running his fingers along the staves to check for shifting. He stayed until she pulled the oilcloth tightly over the head of the tub and told him gently, “Good night, Amos.”

She did not know that he lingered until he was certain she slept. She knew only quiet contentment as she pulled the cloth down each night. She began to wonder if he had a voice what it might sound like. Peabody said Amos was mute but had never said why; perhaps he’d been badly injured. She wondered if he could make any sounds at all, and how he told fortunes while voiceless.

While Amos dreamt the dreams of a wild boy — of marshes teeming with animals, of soft mosses to sleep on, of the pleasures of cold rivers on the skin, of a lovely woman in the water, hair spread around her like blowing grass — Evangeline’s nights were darker. She dreamt of crawling from the gray house in Krommeskill, knees bloodied and caked with mud and pine needles. Always her grandmother followed, face purpled, begging for mercy and salvation. Why? Why? I loved you so.

The troupe had left Philadelphia for New Castle’s pointed brick houses when the sky shattered and sheets of rain threatened to flood the menagerie. The small horse kicked and bucked inside her wagon, the llama screamed like a wounded child. Fearing that any attempt at progress would mire them, Peabody ordered the wagons to halt until the rain passed. Nighttime broke into thick heat that forced everyone to their beds. The air hung heavy with thunderheads and the sky became a weight that held Evangeline down as her grandmother once had. She slept the disquieted sleep of the guilty.

It began with the dream of running, the bloodied knees and gasping for air. It ended with falling, forced to the kitchen floor by her grandmother’s palm against her throat, prying her lips open, pouring pitcher after pitcher of scalding water down. Boiling water overflowed her mouth, burned her gut, filling the empty places that guilt had carved.

Her cry carried through the camp, startling those nearby. Amos awoke, his body shooting into a crouch. He sniffed the air and listened. The echo brushed his skin with an electric snap. He leapt from his bed in Peabody’s wagon, threw back the velvet curtain, and followed the sound.

Toes sinking into soft ground, he crept to her upended tub. Tentative hands peeled back oilcloth and curtain. Wide eyes peered through. In the curved tub bottom she thrashed and kicked, not the woman he watched rise from the water but an animal caught in a trap. He listened. She panted. No, she choked. She couldn’t breathe, was tossing, was not right, was afraid.

He climbed in beside her, fingers grazing her cheek. He pressed a hand to her shoulder and felt a pull. Come here. He shook her gently, surprised by the softness of her skin and how cool she was despite the heat.

Evangeline’s eyes opened. She jerked away, knocking her body heavily against the tub’s boards, her mouth working but making no sound. Amos understood. There was too much sound, it couldn’t leave all at once. She shuddered against the wall.

He touched her collarbone. Her arms went around him and he noticed a deep red welt on her shoulder from the staves. It was a fascinating thing. He traced the edges, circling with his fingertips. A mottled, dark spot against her skin, a flush gone too deep — how could a bruise be so lovely? He tried to take her from the bed, away from the dream. He tugged her hand but she held tighter and cried more. Water ran from her eyes. He didn’t understand why, but it made him need to hold to her. When he tried to put her down, to coax her back to sleep, she would not move. She felt like something warm that wouldn’t take shape in his head, a fuzzy memory, something from before, when he’d been small.

He thought they would lie down, that he would curl up on the mattress with the very soft girl with the bumpy knees and the pretty bruise. She slept. Yes, Evangeline could sleep. Amos decided he would stay awake. Just in case. She was very scared and soft like duck’s down.

* * *

Desperate to empty the space of stale air and bad spirits, Madame Ryzhkova had opened her wagon door and looked across the rain-soaked clearing. Then she’d heard the scream. A shiver at the base of her neck, the cold a woman feels when the dead speak her name. She’d heard the sound before, had traveled oceans to escape it. She’d closed her eyes quickly, only to summon the image of a man’s pale hand with familiar square fingertips disappearing below the surface of a frigid stream. When she’d opened her eyes again she saw the shadow of her apprentice running. To where the drowning girl slept. Ryzhkova’s lip curled. She spat to keep from saying it, but the name would not be contained. “Rusalka.”

* * *

In the first light of morning, Peabody found them together, a bundle of tired bodies, half buried in straw from a torn mattress. Amos’s arm curved tightly around the wing of Evangeline’s shoulder; his fingers brushed an ugly bruise. They made an oddly joined puzzle, but the pieces fit in the right craggy places. It had been years since he’d felt longing like the boy did, at least ten since his wife had passed. He wanted to pat the boy on his head, to muss his hair a little, but thought it best not to wake them. He quietly pulled the oilcloth down, then patted himself on the back at his good fortune. A future filled with wonderful children — Wild Boys and mermaids, fortune-tellers and dancers — profitable beauties, all.