I didn’t know how to do anything else, other than try to get my ticket to the town where they lived. Everything since my family’s death had led me to this train ride and what was waiting past the station there.
Once I was in the station, a hunger like nausea crept over me. I took a cup of tea at a counter and waited by the gate, watching the travelers.
The cup of tea cost money, of course, and so as I waited I had a little less even than before. Soon I would need to eat. And if I did not get on the train, I would need a place to sleep.
The policemen of the station eyed me warily. I sat with my tea, opening and closing my hand over the flower as I thought of what to do. How to go to Lucerne and also keep this pin.
I stayed until I decided to stay, find more work, and return the dress.
The rose did seem to bring me luck at first. Even my bad luck turned to good.
When I sneaked back to the clothesline to return the dress, the laundress caught me, and while she was angry at first, she soon ridiculed me in French, saying I was a clown, if a pretty one, and asked me why I had no clothes.
I could see the tents of the Cajun Maidens still in the distance behind her as she spoke.
When I didn’t answer right away, she told me I was clearly stupid but that she would take pity on me. If I would work for her to repay her for her trouble, she would not call the police. And with that, she led me from the field. By that afternoon, I had from her the plain smock of a grisette, not so nice but good enough, and a place to hide from my old circus boss, who I was sure was looking for me. By evening, I was helping to deliver clothes to the room of the courtesan whose dress I’d stolen there at the hotel where the laundry was. She did not receive me, but I saw her small slippered foot from the door.
I did not tell the laundress where I was from. She never mentioned, when the papers the next day announced the disappearance of one of the circus stars, how she had found me. Even if she had connected the girl found near the circus in her mistress’s laundry with the one said to have escaped, she would have been incredulous to think the girl who fumbled mending knew how to jump from a running horse and then back on again. I smiled in the first month when, on errands, I saw the circus poster still advertising me standing on the back of the horse, waving my hat in the air. And then soon the other posters covered it and the little cowgirl was gone.
The laundress repaired costumes for the Cirque Napoléon. After I had made a delivery for her, the owner caught me riding on one of the horses, having charmed one of the grooms. Again my bad luck turned good when he was, despite his anger, greatly impressed by my way with horses and insisted I come work for him.
The Cirque Napoléon was like putting a circus in a theater, as if someone had cast a spell on a circus tent and turned it to stone, filling it with gaslight chandeliers and columns. There was a circular track down in the center where we performed, ringed by rows of seats climbing in circles. The audience was larger than any I’d seen at the Cajun Maidens, and we performed with an orchestra, mostly Conservatoire boys, made elegant by their white shirts and frock coats, who played for beer or wine. The patrons came in and out as they pleased with their drinks and cigarettes, down red carpets lining the stairs to the ring.
I rode a horse bareback, tumbling across its back before leaping through flaming hoops, landing back on the horse as it rode on. The act was my idea, born from my dreams of fire-breathing. The hoops were enormous and the flames ringed the top half. They had paper centers that would shatter with a sound like a drum and catch fire, the burning bits fluttering down into the dirt floor of the ring and winking out.
I did not sing, not yet. I still worried that my old cirque was still in Paris or nearby and that if I sang they might find me, though I feared this less each week. Most nights the ring exerted a certain magic, and in it, I could feel as if I were powerful, possessed of a grace I never felt when I was off the horse. And never more so than when my new friend Euphrosyne was in the audience. For this felt lucky, too.
§
Euphrosyne came to see me the very next day after our meeting, as she said she would, with her new gentleman. He was a handsome young man, and he was new, perhaps just eighteen, barely shaving, a prince with a hero’s name. They sat in the front row and clapped wildly with laughter, cheering as I exploded through the flaming paper hoop and landed again on the horse. I’d never enjoyed it so much as then. Afterward, I sat with them at their table and he poured some champagne for me, my first.
She came regularly to see me, and I soon would leave a ticket for her if she had no young man, though this was rare. She took me to her cobbler and bought me my first pair of cancan heels one morning after a visit from the princeling, pulling the franc notes from her bag with a smile and laying them on the table as if we were going to play baccarat. The cobbler folded the notes into his register quickly before motioning me to sit, and then he tenderly took my foot in his hand to measure.