ACT ONE

The girl looks all of a puzzle. We have that effect sometimes on those who have never seen us before. Or perhaps she is wondering why she had to kneel to me. It was not just so she could pin my dress, or so I could look her in the eye. This is what one does before a queen, and I think I have been a queen for most of my life, long before Mr Barnum manufactured me so. It was necessary for a young person such as myself to have dignity and command. Otherwise I would be nothing but a doll, to be dandled and discarded. Look at the Queen of England: not tiny, to be sure, but certainly a plain little dumpling, as my husband irreverently calls her. Even her crown is little. But Lord, such dignity. Such command.

My reign began on a sled in Middleborough, Massachusetts, during the winter I turned six. Father said I looked like a Chinese emperor. I sat wrapped in woollen shawls, wearing a red stocking hat, while my schoolmates pulled me. When I yelled directions, they swerved whichever way I wanted. We played that game every winter for five years. Sometimes the little brothers and sisters rode on the sled, but they whined and fell off and got left behind in the snow. They did not have the knack of command. Minnie was always too young to go with us (there are eight years between us sisters), and though she cried and begged it was just as well: she would have tossed and rolled and sent us all skidding to perdition.

Dignity came later and was harder won. I thought I would be the queen of Colonel Wood’s floating theatre until I saw Miss Hardy’s button boots. I was sixteen then and quite the heir presumptive. But those boots gaped at me in all their enormity on the threshold of the stateroom we were to share on the steamboat. There was a bulge in the leather of each boot where the big toe poked up. Who could fill those shoes?

Miss Hardy was more nurse than queen to me. She came from Wilton, Maine. She was double-chinned, gentle and affectionate, smelled of gardenias and measured eight feet tall. Once I had overcome my awe, I would climb into her lap for a sleep, or to have my frequent headaches soothed as the steamboat throbbed its way down the Mississippi.

Colonel Wood was my cousin, had a well-trimmed goatee, wore white suits without a speck of soot on them and always carried a pair of white gloves; and because of all these things my parents trusted him when he asked me to travel for a season on his showboat. Every day, wearing one of the three matching ensembles in royal blue that Colonel Wood had made us pay for out of our wages, Miss Hardy and I took a promenade on the floating theatre stage. The customers greeted us with gasps and cheers and cracks about the long and the short of it. I assumed Miss Hardy caused all the commotion, until some visitors approached me, stooped down and peered most impudently at my face and my bosom.

‘Why do they stare so?’ I asked Miss Hardy afterwards.

‘Don’t mind them. They just want to be sure.’

‘Sure? Of what?’

‘That Colonel Wood isn’t humbugging them with a little child.’

‘How do you do,’ I said, curtseying to the next gentleman who came close to inspect me. ‘I am Lavinia Warren and I am sixteen years old.’

‘Of the Plymouth Warrens? Who came to Massachusetts in 1650? Three brothers. One was lame and had a humpback, one had very large ears, one had six fingers on one hand. I am descended from Stephen, who had six fingers.’

I watched him in silence.

The gentleman cleared his throat. ‘Has any member of your family six fingers on one hand or six toes on one foot?’

I drew myself very straight, looked up into his watery eyes. ‘I am descended from William, Earl of Warren, who married the daughter of William the Conqueror. We came to America on the Mayflower. General Joseph Warren laid down his life for his country at the battle of Bunker Hill. I am sorry to disappoint you, sir, but no one in my family ever had six fingers on one hand, or six toes on one foot, or a limp, or a humpback, or very large ears.’

The gentleman looked hard at my hands and feet, then back at my grave face. Could he tell I was chaffing him?

‘Or a deficient brain,’ I added.

‘Well done, dear,’ whispered Miss Hardy. ‘You tell ’em.’

Then the war began, and we had to leave the South, where it was not safe to stay, in case we were caught up the creek behind enemy lines.

‘You are never going away again,’ my mother told me when I returned home. ‘The world is not safe for you.’

‘It seems no less safe for me than for any other soul,’ I replied.

For a while I went back to my old school to teach, but standing on a chair to rap knuckles with a ruler did not seem work I was cut out for. So I resumed my old round of cooking, sewing and housekeeping. I would not give myself airs, pretend I was too good for such tasks. And yet they vexed me, and Minnie vexed me more.

She was nine then, my little raggedy shadow, grown almost up to my shoulder. She followed me everywhere, as she had always done, asking me again and again to tell her stories of Miss Hardy and the gentlemen who inspected us. I am sure I was very patient. I told her that if she wished to meet the public, she must fix her deportment and learn tidier ways. She took to pulling the pins out of my hair and using them to fasten impertinent and badly spelled labels to my back. Steme Bote Quene, Hoyty Toyty Miss and the like. I ask you.

I felt I had to get away. I could choose between another river tour with Colonel Wood, in a safer part of the country, or an offer from a Mr Barnum to appear at his American Museum, on the corner of Broadway and Ann Street, New York, to be followed by a tour of Europe. I was inclined to take the Colonel’s offer, but then Mr Barnum invited my parents and myself to his home in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Let me pass on the opulent appointments of his magnificent house and say only that I found him a tall dark fellow with a florid complexion who gazed at me as if lovestruck.

‘Miss Warren,’ he boomed. ‘You are a miracle. A Queen of Beauty.’

Well. Such soft soap. I told him I was sorry, but I was already engaged. Then my mother said I was not exactly engaged at present, which made me frown, and I assured Mr Barnum that Colonel Wood was making my worldwide reputation.

Mr Barnum found that very funny. ‘On a paddleboat up a creek? Miss Warren, you deserve better than a bunch of Southern riff-raff. You deserve kings and queens and emperors at your feet. I can give you the entire Americas, Britain, Europe, Asia … Australia, if you wish it.’

I told him there was no need to get barbarous. He made to say more, but I hushed him and told him I would not wear royal blue, it did nothing for my complexion. He positively danced around me, told me I would wear any colour, style or fabric I desired, no expense spared, gowns from Madame Demorest of Broadway and jewellery from Messrs Ball and Black. He offered me his hand, which swallowed my own. My mother was clinging to my father’s arm, both smiling. I felt light, ready to float away, except for the red hand anchoring me.

On Sundays, when the American Museum was closed and the crowds had gone home, the Great Skeletal Chamber became a nursery and playground. I was surprised that the resident children of the museum were not frightened by the thunder lizards and their still greater shadows flickering on the wall. But they had seen the miracles so many times.

One evening, soon after my arrival in New York, I stood and watched as Madame Josephine Clofullia tried to get the children to sit cross-legged on the floor and look at their Bibles. Her luxuriant beard did not help her to impose discipline. Hendrik the albino boy ran up and down the hall, chuffing and whistling, his phantom train echoing round the arched ceiling. Malcolm the fat boy, pocket knife in hand, was trying to chisel a thunder lizard’s toe bone out of its socket. The five Indian children, wrapped in threadbare blankets, crouched on the floor in a sullen knot.

‘Oh, Miss Warren,’ said Madame Clofullia, in her breathy Swiss accent, ‘I have such a nice story for the boys and girls, the story of Jacob and Esau, but they will not be told.’

I wondered if I should offer to take over. It would not take me long to get the children’s noses into their Bibles, but I did not wish to usurp Madame Clofullia’s duties. And I had spent all morning trying on my new gowns and jewels, and all afternoon playing hostess in the museum, in peach silk with amethysts at my throat and wrists, standing on a pedestal table, smiling and shaking hands and murmuring greetings and laughing. The room had been as full of gaping heads as my mother’s preserving jars were full of pickled onions. I supposed I had been a success. My feet ached, my stays pinched, my face was a dead mask of smiles.

Malcolm looked up from his chiselling, and a grin split his moon face. ‘Here he is!’

Hendrik stopped in mid-whistle; the Indians shrugged off their blankets. They all ran towards the figure entering the chamber, who I first thought was another child. Then General Tom Thumb gave a big masculine laugh and emptied his pockets, showering them with bonbons. The children pounced, then fell back, sucking their treasures.

‘Mercy,’ he cried. ‘You have cleaned me right out of treats.’ Then he greeted us, the ladies, and asked how we found the children.

‘Obstreperous,’ said Madame Clofullia.

At once he suggested she go and rest; he would supervise them until their bedtime. ‘Perhaps, Miss Warren, you would care to keep me company?’

I had no reason to refuse. He made no attempt to organise the children, just stood back and let them play. Malcolm chalked squares and numbers on the floor, then hopped slowly down his row of squares, wheezing and chanting. Hendrik followed him. At the end of the row, Malcolm jumped, turned, jumped again, thighs a jelly-wobble, and looked to the General for approval. I too looked. For some reason my frank gaze was difficult to summon: I could only manage sidelong glances. Everything about the General spoke manliness. When I had seen him before, from a distance, holding court, he cut such a fine figure I suspected he might be one of Mr Barnum’s automatons. At closer quarters he was broad of shoulder and chest; hair in glossy waves; faint scent of cologne and cigars; hint of portliness about his chin and below his waistcoat; moustache my mother would hate.

He felt my glance and turned. ‘How did your levee go today, Miss Warren?’

I told him it went well, although it was very crowded and hot, and I asked him how he dealt with all those people.

‘I don’t find it hard — I’ve been meeting the public all my life. That is my profession, meeting the public. It comes to me like breathing. It will come to you the same way soon.’

I tried to imagine a world packed with pickle-jar heads.

‘It is a noble and profitable profession,’ said the General, his hands behind his back. I was about to say that nobility was more important than profit, but then my hand went up to my collarbone and encountered the amethysts, and I stayed silent and confused, feeling his gaze, wondering where my queenliness had gone.

‘What do you think of these children, Miss Warren?’

‘They are most singular,’ I said. ‘Like everyone in this museum.’

‘Some are more singular than others,’ said the General, smiling into my eyes. ‘I like to come here and watch the children. They don’t watch you back. Not much.’

I looked down hurriedly. He turned back to the hopscotch game, his smile growing wistful, and his left knee began to bend, his left foot slowly rising behind him, until he stood on one foot with the unconscious grace of a heron.

I have often wondered since if that was the moment I fell in love with him.

The proposal came at Iranistan, Mr Barnum’s grand house at Bridgeport, the town where the General also lived. For months he had made frequent visits to his sister in New York and always dropped by at the museum to see me and talk to me. I grew very impatient for his visits. Then when I visited Mr Barnum for a weekend, the General took me for a ride in his carriage around Bridgeport, stopping at his mother’s house and showing me his apartment fitted out with fine furniture designed for his size. His mother, who wore too many diamonds on her fleshy neck, grinned at me with broken teeth and told the General that his girl was a damn fine filly. I smiled and pretended not to hear. We drove on. He pointed out several of his properties and when I remarked that it seemed he and Mr Barnum owned all Bridgeport between them, he swelled and smiled.

After dinner that evening, Mr Barnum and all his guests excused themselves one by one, leaving me alone with the General, huddled by the fire in the cavernous drawing room, playing backgammon. The General did not seem to care for the game. He stood up and took to the fire with the poker. Then he took a piece of paper from his pocket and unfolded it into a sheet as big as a newspaper. It trembled a little in his hands. He sat down, handed it to me and asked me if I knew what it was.

‘It is an insurance policy,’ I said.

He leaned forward, hands on knees, explaining the policy to me, pointing out clauses and signatures. His house was mortgaged and insured, he got the interest, and the man who had given him the mortgage had to pay the taxes. That was the way he did all his business. I tried not to smile. He drew his chair a little closer, cleared his throat and asked about my forthcoming tour of Europe. Would I not be lonely? Would I not like him to accompany me so he could explain all the strange customs and peoples?

‘You told me you had plenty of money and were tired of travelling,’ said I.

‘I should like it first-rate if I were to go too.’

‘Perhaps Mr Barnum will fix it, if you ask him.’

He put his arm along the back of my chair. ‘Don’t you think it would be pleasanter if we went as man and wife?’

I had expected it, and yet I felt a thrill of surprise. It was like a play. A familiar, wonderful play. He called me dear, asked me to call him Charlie, kissed me on the cheek and asked me to say yes.

I remember I was so happy, and yet so afraid the whole scene was some dark plot of Mr Barnum’s. But that kiss had such fervour. My cheek glowed.

‘Well, perhaps I might love you enough. But I can never say yes without my mother’s consent.’

‘Then may I visit your mother and ask, pet?’

I sat for a moment as if in deep thought. He kissed my ear and I felt the kiss as something between a tickle and an explosion. ‘You had better shave your moustache first.’

When she knew of our engagement, Mother said we must have a little talk. I thought it would be about property, or Charlie’s supposed haughtiness, or that moustache.

We sat in the old family parlour in Middleborough under august pictures of the Warren ancestors. Mother reached out and took my hand.

‘Marry by all means. But you must not have children.’

I was too stunned to reply. Mother said that after seven children, she knew what she was talking about. ‘Giving birth would kill you. It cannot be contemplated.’

Rallying, I said that Charlie and I would surely have children like ourselves, and what was wrong with that?

‘You cannot be sure. Look at me. Don’t risk it, Lavinia. Do whatever you must to avoid it. There is a curse on us Warrens. It follows us down the generations, it looks for a chance to strike.’

I laughed and assured Mother I was not in the slightest danger, and I did not believe in curses. But I began to dream of formless, heaving things. Mother’s words had planted a cold blue embryo in my womb. On the eve of my marriage, I had a little talk with Charlie, and we came to our arrangement.

These nights, we lie under the covers and listen to the river and the strange Australian birds and Charlie rubs my hands. He says he will give me everything I want. There must be a way. The miracles of science can achieve so much. I pat his hand, say it is not necessary, ignore the faint ache in my belly.

I try not to think about babies, even when they sit in my lap. I imagine they are clockwork creatures you might wind up in Mr Barnum’s museum. It’s easier that way.