Brynt knew that, of course she knew that. For one thing, obviously, there was the glowing. His skin would start shining that eerie blue color and he’d get this quiet look in his eyes and there was no trick in it, none at all. Not that Mr. Beecher or Mr. Fox knew the truth of it—a performer was entitled to their own secrets, their own tricks, after all. Most likely they assumed the kid was painted in some sort of luminescent paint, iridium, maybe, like she’d seen spiritualists use on their ridiculous ectoplasm, back in drawing room seances in England. Never mind that the shining was stranger than that, more beautiful, as if it went right through a person, as if you could see through his skin to the bright veins and bones and lungs and everything.
He’d said to her once, while she was painting her own face for the night’s stage, that he was afraid of what he could do. “What if I can’t stop it, Brynt? What if one time I can’t?”
And that was the other thing about him: the way he seemed to worry so. It wasn’t like any eight-year-old she’d ever known. “Can’t stop what, honey?” she’d asked.
“What happens to me. The shining. What if one night it just gets worse?”
“Then we can use you to find things in the dark.”
He’d looked at her in the little mirror with such a serious look on his face.
“You just let me worry for the both of us,” she’d said. “All right?”
“Mama used to say I could choose what I did. That it was up to me.”
“That’s right.”
“But it isn’t always, is it? A choice, I mean. You can’t always choose.”
It was like he’d been thinking about something else, something darker, more disturbing, and she’d wondered all at once if it was his mother, if it was Eliza he was thinking about.
“Sometimes we don’t get to choose,” she’d said gently. “That’s true.”
“Yeah,” he’d said.
She’d looked at him then, really looked at him. The way he was regarding his own gray face in the mirror, biting his lip, the shock of black hair falling over his forehead. And she’d put down her paint and drawn him in close.
“Oh, honey,” she’d said, like she often did, whenever she didn’t know what else to say.
* * *
Now she was holding her skirts in one hand and picking her way through the morning muck and guylines, seeking Mr. Beecher’s office. Marlowe half ran alongside her to keep up.
Beecher was the managing partner and paymaster. Brynt had decided in the night that she would have to talk to him anyhow, that it was time, but then in the morning, right after breakfast, a girl had knocked at their wagon with word that she and the boy were wanted at Mr. Beecher’s office, right away, if you please. Brynt did not go in for coincidences, she believed there was a shape to the world and to its happenings, whether she could see it or not, and she’d thought of that night’s dream and of the feeling that was in her still and she’d frowned and reached for her hat.
Everywhere reeked of wet horses and hay. There were trash and playbills trampled in the mud. Figures squatted on the steps of the traveling wagons, unshaven, turning coffee in tin cups. These were those whose gifts did not belong in the world. Geeks and clowns, palm readers and fire-eaters. They followed her with dark eyes. She and Marlowe had worked the sideshow stages here for six weeks now and still they were outsiders, strangers, keeping to themselves mostly, but Brynt didn’t mind, preferred it in fact. She had been among such people all her life and knew they were no worse than any others, no more like her than anyone, never mind their own strangeness. People were people, and mostly that meant they took what they could, whenever they could.
She had always been different, all her life.
“You’re like a left foot,” her uncle used to say. That was when she was just a girl, back in San Francisco, living those days in the apartment house he superintended. Her uncle had been a pugilist, famous in some circles, winning fight after fight until one night he didn’t, and then beginning the long slow slide into headaches, and fists so swollen they couldn’t close right, and a slurring speech. He’d raised her to fight and by the age of ten she would already hunt the biggest boy in any street and sometimes it seemed fighting was all she’d ever known. She’d loved him though, her uncle, loved his big gentle ways, how he never made her feel anything but normal, despite her size and her great strength. It surprised her sometimes to think about her life, how much of the world she had seen, meeting the reverend in San Francisco in the year after her uncle died, going with him south to Mexico. That was where she first inked her skin. Later she and the reverend sailed for England, traveled Spain, returned to England. Now that she was back in America she understood that no place was her own.
She trudged brooding across the fairground, Marlowe leaping and skipping across the mud. A strangeness was in her heart. A hammer rang out in the cold air, twice, then twice again, like a warning. An ancient clown in shirtsleeves raised his face from a water barrel, razor open in his hand. He nodded gravely at them as they passed. Away at a fence line a woman wearing a frock coat over a pair of long underwear was hauling a pail of water. Out beyond loomed a reef of cloud dark against a darker sky.
Whatever it was Mr. Beecher wanted, she could not guess. But she was herself thinking that she and Marlowe had been working the sideshow over a month now, and that was too long by half, and it was time to be moving on.
* * *
There were three of them. They were seated around Beecher’s desk in the mud-spattered tent he called his office and they all turned as one when she entered. She had to dip her head because of the low entrance and she reached out a hand and felt Marlowe take two of her fingers in his little fist. One of them was a woman, dressed in a blue velvet dress, a wide-brimmed hat placed delicately on her yellow curls so that her eyes were in shadow. Under the hem of her skirt Brynt glimpsed mud-spattered boots. As her eyes adjusted, she saw the woman’s nose had been broken long ago and set crookedly and her eyes were full of flint so that Brynt understood she was neither delicate nor refined. She had an air of ferocity and suspicion that Brynt, in other circumstances, might have been drawn to.
Mr. Fox, ever the gentleman, stood politely as Brynt came in, but Beecher just leaned back in his chair, chewing at his cigar in the gloom.
“And here she is, Big Brynt herself,” Beecher said insolently. “Good of you to bring the kid, sweetheart. This here is Miss Alice Quicke, a private detective from—”
“England,” said the stranger, who was looking at Marlowe curiously.
“—the distant isles of fairest England. Miss Quicke was just explaining how easy it is to mistake, ah, what was it? Yes. One stolen boy for another.”
“I never said stolen,” she said quietly.
Brynt hesitated, peering at their faces, letting her eyes adjust. Then she turned to the third among them. “Mr. Fox, sir,” she said. “What is this regarding?”
“The boy, Miss Brynt. Your Marlowe. Correct me when I say you are not his blood relative, yes?” When she said nothing, Mr. Fox cleared his throat apologetically. “Please, sit. I’m sure there is an explanation to it all. Hello, son.”
Marlowe peered around, silent.
The tent was narrow, lit by an ancient lantern at the corner of the desk. It occurred to Brynt she could go, she knew this, she could just turn around and go, taking Marlowe with her, and not one of the three could stop her, she’d wager, not even the detective woman. She remembered the bad business Eliza had been mixed up in, back in England, and didn’t know if there was some connection to it, but she didn’t really care to find out.
But she didn’t go. The lumbered boards underfoot were loose and scrawled with dried clay and they banged up under her bulk as she came forward and reversed the empty chair and hiked her skirts and sat, her massive arms folded up over the chairback.