Until my departure from the show, I never left the confines of the tent village wherever we were. Some days it was as if the world shifted around us in the night, the foreign cities each time nearly as nameless to me as the men I picked from the ring to meet me beside the clowns.
The Cajun Maidens adopted me and taught me my falls and tumbles, how to walk on my hands, how to understand their mixture of French, Russian, Spanish, and English. They gave me a knife to wear on my thigh, a dagger. They called it a circus dowry, and they never took theirs off except when bathing, and even then they set them on the edge of the tub, and soon I was the same.
I pulled it out of its sheath at night, testing the edge.
The knife came with lessons on how to use it. If a man was attacking me, I was to cut for the places they’d have to hold shut—the underside of a wrist, the throat—not to try to stab for the heart first, they said.
The heart is a difficult target, Priscilla said with a smile. Laughter came from her sisters as she said it. But everyone forgets to protect their hands. This is a mistake. A grim satisfaction crossed her face. Also, you may not want to kill them, she said. But only teach a lesson. And then she paused. But it may be you want to kill them, and there was more laughter.
For your future husband, said the circus matron. To give to him however you might choose. She winked and patted her own.
§
While at first I was frightened of trying to speak, I soon took to trying once each day. For who could say when would be the day I was forgiven? What if the voice was only to be gone three years, or ten, and not forever? This was the way to know. The first times I tried, I felt as though I were sneaking up to God to see if He was still angry, but soon I was at ease trying.
Soon the voice began to whisper back.
That first morning I made a sound; the sound of my voice felt like I had fallen down a well in my own throat. But I took it as the beginning I had waited for.
Understand, I had no love for Paris when I chose to leave that day—it was only another place to pass through, a station on a train. It was enough for me that I could speak again, enough to ask questions. The voice sounded odd but could be understood. The morning I could say “a ticket please” clearly and loudly in English and French was our third morning in Paris, and with that, I hatched my plan.
Seven
THAT DAY I first stepped out onto the streets of Paris was the day I was to perform for the Emperor, and it began with my sneaking out to buy a train ticket dressed in a ridiculous costume borrowed from the costume mistress.
If I had succeeded, I can’t imagine the tale I’d tell here now.
I had told the costume mistress I wanted to go out to see some sights but didn’t want to wear my buckskin. She found me the costume for the clown who we hid in the audience, playing at being the kind of wife never allowed anywhere but brought out to the circus for a bit of fun. The other clowns typically carried her off screaming, and the performer who played her later returned to the ring wearing the same dress, complete with clown makeup, and an enormous clown kiss painted along her cheek.
Don’t tell a soul, the costume mistress had said to me, to which I gave an exasperated sigh. Of course I would tell no one. They won’t mistake you for a Parisienne, she smirked. It might do you good to spend a coin or two on some Paris fashion while you’re there.
I greeted this suggestion with bewilderment until I stood almost in the street.
I was dressed in a dun-colored day dress, the skirt full of crinolines; leather boots laced to just below the knee; a gray bonnet. I don’t know that the average citizen of Paris had ever seen a colonial farm wife before, but I’d hoped that day, because of the Expo and the many other more strangely dressed people, that I blended in. Once I stood in the glassed entrance to the Expo, unable to enter the crowd, I knew I did not.
A strange pressure was crawling on my skin. What I wanted to do seemed as likely to happen as turning to the wall and passing through the solid stone.
The costume mistress had told me the omnibus would have a flag. Look for the signs for the Gare de l’Est, she’d said.