But she didn’t see Felix Fox. Not anywhere.
She paused. She stood in place and turned and looked all around but he wasn’t there. “Who’s still inside?” she shouted at a rig operator, a man she knew worked the big top flywheel.
He was black with smoke.
“Is Mr. Fox still inside?”
He gaped at her, he shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “I never saw.”
She started to run then. She ran away from the fire feeling the awful heat at her back and she ran between the cool of the wagons, hunting for Felix Fox’s tent. There was no light within. She burst in, calling his name.
“Mr. Fox? Mr. Fox, sir!” she shouted.
The tent was still, was dark. She fumbled her way to the desk, remembering it from earlier that day, and found the lantern and the candle and was surprised to feel it still warm. Somebody had been there not long ago. She looked for the flint and sparked it and lit the candle and closed the little glass door. And then she saw his body.
“My God,” she breathed.
Mr. Fox lay sprawled in his chair behind the desk, his long legs cast wide, one shoe kicked off. His face was a dark red, his eyes flecked with blood, the eyelids and the skin under them bruised and ringed in black. His clawlike fingers were upturned in his lap as if seeking benediction, as if seeking grace.
He’d died suffering.
Over everything, like a fine dusting of black snow, lay that same strange silky black soot she had found earlier that day.
Brynt stumbled outside, dizzy. She was breathing hard. The fire was still raging across the circus grounds. She stood a long moment in the stillness of that part of the field watching the orange glow over the tents and then, without thinking, almost as if it were another person doing it, she walked slowly back over to her wagon and took the little carpetbag off the table, the one she’d packed earlier that night, the one with her clothes and the book of engravings for Marlowe, and she turned away from the horror and the roar and the slaughter and started for town.
But at the edge of the fire’s light she stopped. There was something near the fence, a figure, standing perfectly still in the darkness, a figure holding a hat and almost indistinguishable from the darkness itself. Brynt, staring, her clothes streaked with smoke and sweat, knew him at once, knew who he was, what he’d done. Most of all, she knew who he was seeking. Her blood was loud in her ears. The monster stood unmoving with his hands loose at his sides and he just watched as the big top burned, crumpled, fell in on itself. After a while he put on his hat, and turned, and made his silent way out into the night.
And Brynt followed.
6
WAKING THE LITCH
Charlie Ovid had no memory of his father. Some nights when he was very small and his mother was still alive she would tell him about the man who had made him and loved him and he would listen in the moonlight of some crowded quarter house to her whisper. He was a good man, she said, but a troubled one. She did not ever know his family. He’d left everything and descended into London to make his way and it was there she had met him and fallen in love.
“His kind and our kind wasn’t supposed to be together anyplace, Charlie,” she would tell him. “But he didn’t care about that. He thought there’d be a better world coming, one we could all be a part of. He thought we just needed to survive long enough to see it.”
And Charlie would listen wide-eyed in the shadows as his mother ran calloused fingers through his hair. She was herself the daughter of Jamaican freedmen, her parents still young when they were brought to England from a plantation north of Kingston, their benefactor a white man of wealth and privilege but also, she insisted, with an outrage at the world as it was, not unlike Charlie’s own father. Maybe that was a part of why she’d fallen in love with him, she’d whisper. And sometimes when she thought it was safe she would take from her skirts the little silver wedding ring, given to her by his father, and press it into Charlie’s wrist, so that he could stare at the strange markings in the cold moonlight, the twin crossed hammers and the fiery sun, until they faded up out of his skin and were gone.
Who was his father, what had happened to him, what had his life been before? It was all of it beyond Charlie’s imagining. It was like this bone-deep ache inside him, what he remembered and what he couldn’t remember. He thought sometimes about how his flesh could heal from anything but how the real hurts, the ones deep inside him, never got any better. When his mother died, he’d drifted seeking work, and there was in him some vague notion to find his father’s grave off that wagon trail in the west, to stand bareheaded over the dry dirt and stones that held the man his mother had loved, and who had loved him, Charlie, and to pay his respects. But of course it wasn’t to be; a half-black kid with no family and no name couldn’t just wander through the counties of the South in his shirtsleeves without soon finding himself at the wrong end of a stick.
* * *
And then this Mr. Coulton entered his life, a man from England searching for him, Charlie, of all people. And he had the same crest—the twin hammers and the fiery sun—on an envelope in his keeping. Charlie was wary, he was careful, and he was filled with a fierce anxiety. Something at Cairndale would tell him about his father, who he was, what had happened to him, Charlie was sure of it.
He just had to find it.
The thing was, Mr. Coulton, in his bright yellow waistcoats, and his auburn whiskers, wasn’t like any white man Charlie had known. It made him think of that benefactor from his mother’s stories, all those years ago, that white man who’d helped his grandparents leave Jamaica. And when Mr. Coulton looked at Charlie all that long ocean crossing, in the lavish lower first-class cabin of the SS Servia, a steamship of dazzling brass fixtures and electric lights in the saloon and a hull that carved through the gray swells like a blade, the man really looked, not with disgust or anything, not in anger, not like he was looking for a rat to pulp. He just looked at Charlie like he’d look at anyone, at any person, that is, same as he looked at the ancient steward who delivered their hot towels each evening, or the red-faced boy who brought their ironed laundry, and Charlie, who all his life had learned to drop his eyes at the sight of a white man, and tremble, and wait for the lash, just plain didn’t know what to do with it.
They disembarked in Liverpool on a drizzling morning and Mr. Coulton took his own travel case in hand and they walked side by side up the hill through the rain to the railway station, water running into their collars, seeping into their shoes, impossibly cold, nothing at all like rain in the Delta or the sweeping river rains he’d always known, and no one looked at them askance, not even the police constable swinging his stick in the drizzle. And Mr. Coulton, with his whiskers and big raw-looking hands and bruised bowler hat, purchased two tickets heading south, for St Pancras Station, London.
As the railway carriage rattled and shunted and gathered speed and the rain flecked the windows, Coulton drew the compartment slider shut with a click and sat opposite, and swept off his hat and ran a hand over his balding head. Smoothed out the few hairs he had. Sighed.