The Book of Speculation: A Novel

“Come now, little fish. It’s time we teach you to swim.” She brushed her hand over Bess’s fine black hair.

Amos tucked the baby into his long coat, hiding her from Evangeline’s reach. Fear made him tight.

“You know as well as I that Peabody will need her to work. We must teach her. If we begin now, she won’t dread it the way I once did. I can make it safe for her.”

He wrapped Bess more securely, gathering her into the folds of his shirt. Her grasping fist hooked on to a length of lace. He shook his head, silently cursing that he could not reach his cards.

“It will be years before she can read tarot,” Evangeline reasoned. “And who would tell their secrets to a child? Most wouldn’t want a child touching the cards at all.”

He did not need her to say the rest. She did not want Bess near the cards. He would be unable to speak to his daughter.

Amos held Bess against the wall of the wagon, shuffling the infant into one arm. He removed the cards from their box and smacked the deck down onto a small table, hard enough to shake the legs. He meant to say no, that he was frightened—since the river, since Charlotte. He spread the cards across the table, each humming with his touch.

Evangeline reached for the cards. At the brush of her fingers a wind stirred in the wagon, blowing the deck across the table and to the floor, erasing Amos’s words. New cards took their place, painting violence, a murdered woman, great floods, sorrow, and a map of desolation with her, the Queen of Swords, and him, the Fool, at its center. Evangeline bent to collect the cards, but he stayed her. He studied the placement, the layers of meaning. Bess squealed, the sound muffled by his body. He’d protected Evangeline from Ryzhkova’s dread and the future she had read for him, but the cards on the floor told a different truth; he had been protecting himself. Evangeline had been keeping secrets.

The frail water girl he’d first met had killed. He saw it in the Swords and how they’d scattered, from Death falling across Judgment’s face. Murder was a wearing sin. Each time Evangeline looked for solace, the unsettled spirit would draw misfortune to itself. Her expression held no surprise. He thought of all the cards he’d hidden, how there had been no need. He remembered the red mark that had marred her shoulder when he’d first seen it bared. The welt had torn at him, fascinated him, and his fingers had itched to trace it.

“Please,” she begged. When he shielded Bess from her, Evangeline pressed her lips to his forehead. “I did not mean to kill her,” she said. “I would take it back.” Amos closed his eyes, but he did not let go of the child.

Evangeline had long since left the wagon when Bess began to scream.

Amos spent the remainder of the day in thought, running his fingers across the bed they shared, feeling the impression of her body. She curled up when she slept, a habit from when the tub had been her home. The baby tossed and kicked like her mother. It was good that Bess was not mute like him. He thought of Evangeline’s sureness; she had chosen to swim and had sought out Peabody. The dead woman in the cards—Evangeline had done it.

He was not this way. From the moment he had encountered Peabody his life had not been his own. His name was not his own—whatever it had been lived in a house somewhere beyond his memory. He bundled Bess and put her to rest in the costume trunk. She shrieked, her face twisting and purpling with rage. They might begin again, without the cards or Peabody, in a house in Burlington, a place where they could live a solitary life. He would tell Evangeline he did not believe Ryzhkova, or that he would learn not to believe. It was that bruise that had let him love her, because she needed caring. She’d let him care, had chosen him, she had looked after him, learned for him, and kept him from the cage. A simple bruise.

Bess cried the way others bled, as though she might die from it. He did what he could to comfort her, bouncing her, patting her, and at last turning to Susanna when he could think of nothing else. The contortionist rocked her and called Melina over to rub the child’s belly. Nat popped his cheeks and gave the baby a sweet-smelling root to suckle on, but Bess howled until she choked. She needed her mother.

Amos waited.

Evening came. Evangeline did not return.

*

She’d walked to the ocean, past where the trees thinned into grass, and grass gave way to a strip of sand that beckoned like a smile to come into the water. In the past swimming and the stretch of her body brought her peace, but it did not now. Her breath came deeper than it had before the child; the baby changed her in unexpected ways. The troupe feared her. She could withstand it, but Amos’s distrust cut deep. Her body had been reshaped by the baby, but it had changed too for him; the curve between her neck and shoulder had become a rest for his head, her spine had bent to fit to him, her heart slowed when his did.