October 1927
Belvidere, Illinois
Isabelle’s feet were propped on an overturned half barrel, and the bottoms of her red stockings were filthy, with holes in them large enough to show the calluses and dirt on her feet. In the shadow of the costume tent, she was smoking a cigarette using an elegant jet-black holder that matched her wildly curly bobbed hair. Up close, Cecily could see that several glittering red sequins had been torn from the bodice of her short dress—tiny red threads hung loose—and her red lipstick was nearly worn off.
Mr. Tebow had brought Cecily here after the show and introduced her, then hurried off, promising to be back soon. The sun was sinking and the day cooling; there were still more than three hours till the evening show.
“So, kid,” Isabelle said, blowing out smoke, “the act is that you’re my little sister, and I’m teaching you to follow in my footsteps.”
“Your sister?”
Isabelle shrugged. “Tebow thought you looked like me. I guess you do. And I don’t have a say about any of it, so here you are. Anyway, I never had a sister. Could be fun. You ever been on a horse?”
“No! No, ma’am. Not until today, for the parade!”
Isabelle’s laugh was throaty, like she’d been smoking cigarettes for a hundred years. “Don’t call me ‘ma’am,’ kid. I’m nineteen. Not old enough to be your mother, capiche? Did you like the show?”
“Yes!”
“Did the horses scare you?”
In truth, Cecily had found many parts of the show so thrilling that they were frightening—or was it the other way around?—up to and including Isabelle’s acrobatics with the horses. But, if she was to be Isabelle’s little sister for the act—her whole heart had seized on to the idea—she wasn’t about to let on. “No!”
“Good. Anything scare you?”
“No,” Cecily said, then quickly realized that might not be believable. “Maybe the snake.” It had been twined around the shoulders of that woman all day. She’d paraded around the ring between two of the final acts while Mr. Tebow advertised the allures of the sideshow.
“Smart girl. Want to come meet the horses? They don’t like the snake, either.”
Cecily nodded. Isabelle stubbed out her cigarette and tucked the holder behind her ear, slipping her feet into a pair of shoes unlike any Cecily had seen. They were flat, made of felt, and lined in what looked like rabbit fur. Isabelle noticed Cecily gawking, but didn’t explain, just started limping away.
Cecily hurried to follow her.
The three white Percherons were lined up with a dozen grays, all munching hay from a sweet mound before them, along the edge of the stable tent behind a rope of canvas. “This is where they get a little breather between shows,” Isabelle said. Here, the calliope was a distant whistle and hum, and the sideshow talkers’ enticements mere murmurs, as they exhorted folks to step inside this tent or that one to view the fat lady, the snake charmer, the tattooed man.
A woman in pants with bobbed brown hair was scrubbing a tin bucket outside the stable tent. She looked up at the sound of Isabelle’s voice and smiled.
“That’s Janey, our groom,” Isabelle said. “You ever have a question and I’m not around, ask her. She’s married to one of the Robinsons.” Those were the men in green who’d flown and twisted above the crowd. This woman did not seem glamorous enough to be the wife of one of them.
“Janey,” Isabelle called. “This is Cecily. My new little sister for the act.”
Janey frowned slightly. “Any experience?”
Isabelle laughed that throaty laugh. “We’re making it up as we go.”
“Typical. Well, welcome to the circus, Cecily.” And Janey went back to the bucket.
Cecily had never been greeted by an adult as if she were an actual person, rather than an undesirable source of disruption and noise. Instantly, she saw why one of the glamorous Robinsons would’ve fallen for Janey hard enough to marry her; that it wasn’t a mismatch, after all.
Isabelle made a clicking sound and reached out to one of the Percherons, gesturing for Cecily to hold out her hand, too. The horse was gigantic, taller than Cecily by three. He leaned down and nudged Isabelle’s hand. Cecily thought she saw kindness in his eyes. Then, he leaned down a little farther to nudge Cecily. “This is Wyatt,” Isabelle said. “You can pet him on the nose. There you go. He’s a complete sweetheart. Give him carrots and he’ll love you forever. Janey, got any carrots?”
Cecily, entranced by the wiry softness of Wyatt’s nose, was only vaguely aware of Janey as she came over to give some carrots to Isabelle. Being high up on Blanco’s back earlier today had been nothing compared to this: the intimacy of Wyatt’s brown eyes, the sweet-smelling warmth of his breath.
Isabelle arranged a carrot on Cecily’s palm and guided it toward Wyatt. The horse’s lips tickled Cecily’s palm as he nibbled the carrot away. She was too mesmerized to laugh.
The other two white Percherons, Isabelle introduced as Doc and Virgil. “Doc is laid-back, generally, but, once he gets in the ring, he loves the applause more than any of us.” Virgil, she said, was high-spirited, the most apt to try to trick you with something unexpected, if you weren’t paying attention. Cecily fed them each a carrot out of the palm of her hand. “Boys, this is my new sister,” Isabelle told them, and Cecily’s skin hummed with pleasure.
Then, the older girl’s voice changed; she sounded far away and strange. “With horses, you can’t cheat, and you can’t lie. They know. They instantly know. They read your body language. If only humans had that skill.” She laughed abruptly, reached up to scratch Doc behind the ears. “And you never ask them to do something they don’t want to do, or that they’re not ready to do. Or something you wouldn’t want to do yourself, if you were a horse, if you know what I mean.”
Cecily didn’t know, not exactly. But she decided right then that she would pretend to understand everything that Isabelle said, until she did.
“We were thinking we’d call her Jacqueline,” Isabelle told the tiger lady and a clown with a blue neck ruff, whom she’d introduced to Cecily as Mavis and Ron. The four were sitting at a square table inside the cook top, which buzzed with conversation and the clinking utensils of the performers. Cecily was focused on the incredible meal that was loaded on her tray: sliced ham, scalloped potatoes, sweet corn, more stewed tomatoes; chocolate pie for dessert. When she’d first gotten in line behind Isabelle and gotten a glimpse of what was in store, she’d tugged the older girl’s sleeve and confessed in a whisper, “I ate at lunchtime.” Isabelle had barked out a laugh and said she’d better get used to having three squares a day from now on.
“Jacqueline DuMonde,” Isabelle said to her friends now.
“Oh, yes, that has a lovely ring, especially with your French pronunciation,” Mavis said, and Ron, mouth full of potatoes, nodded in approval.
Isabelle turned to Cecily. “You like that, kid?”
Cecily stopped mid-bite on her corncob, realizing with a start what Isabelle meant. “But I’m Cecily McAvoy.”
They all laughed, not unkindly, but Cecily felt bruised by it. She set down her corn, sat up straighter, pointed her chin.
“We’ve all got stage names here, kid,” Isabelle said. “The better for running away.”
“I’m not running away,” Cecily said. “My mother’s coming back for me. She said so on the form.”
Isabelle had gray eyes, and they went soft as a kitten’s fur. “Aw, kid,” she said, and everyone at the table was quiet, until Mavis said something under her breath that made Isabelle laugh suddenly, and it seemed they forgot about Cecily.
Cecily hunched over her plate and started shoveling potatoes into her mouth, bite after bite until her stomach hurt, and then she kept right on going, because she honestly didn’t trust, after all, that there’d be more tomorrow, or that they wouldn’t send her right straight back to the Home.
Then it was time for Isabelle to get ready for the evening show, and Mr. Tebow hadn’t come back yet. Isabelle said she couldn’t have Cecily underfoot around the horses today—“You’re so green, kid, you might get hurt”—so Cecily should find herself a place in the stands and watch the show, then find her way back to the caboose at the end of the night. “Can you do that, kid? You’d better not get lost, or Tebow will kill me.”
Cecily had never been on her own—trusted with her own safekeeping—in her life. And in the middle of this crowd, plus all these tents and freaks and wild animals!
But, after a second, she saw the opportunity. “Sure!” she said, and grinned. Isabelle was already turning away.
Cecily wandered along the crowded midway, weaving through the crowd to examine the maze of small, dirty sideshow tents. Signs promised each held wonders inside, and men in tattered sequined jackets stood before each one shouting about them. Here was Madame Genevieve, the snake charmer. Lorraine LaPointe, the Bearded Lady. The World’s Tallest Man, Henry Thompson. The sword swallower, Fredric Roseau. Paul Leduc, the World’s Most Tattooed Man. The Tiniest Man in the World, Little Red, and the Fat Lady, Ursula Eve. Cecily sneaked into the menagerie tent and examined the tigers in their wagon-cage, the lion in his, the chimpanzees, the camels, the zebras. All were too vivid to believe. The smell was as heavy as a real thing. Outside again, men swung hammers to try to ring a bell. A thin man in a green apron pulled taffy on a marble slab. Ladies and kids lined up for waxed paper bags of roasted peanuts and popcorn. Cecily sneaked a peek into the Hall of Mirrors and saw herself looking back, wide-eyed and freakishly tall.
That was enough for her. Anyway, she didn’t have any money, plus she wanted to get a good seat for the show.
At the Big Top, she sneaked in the back, where Mr. Tebow had brought her in before. Inhaling the peculiar combination of smells—sawdust, manure, wax-coated canvas, scorched popcorn—she pushed through the crowd and climbed to the top of the rafters. She wanted to keep watch over everything and everybody; to be closer to the aerialists as they flew.
Nothing was less thrilling the second time. And even more thrilling was when Mr. Tebow bellowed, “The incredible Isabelle DuMonde!” and Doc and Virgil and Wyatt came thundering in, and there was Isabelle in red on the back of the last of them, arms splayed out, as if she could capture the world.
After the show, Cecily pretended to be part of a large family nearby. The mother had looked especially kind, doling out nickels for her older children to run for candy and peanuts. Even the father had held the littlest boy in his lap throughout the performance, pointing things out, explaining things, soothing him when he got scared of the lion. As Cecily made her way down the stands with them, one of the older boys gave her a puzzled look, but the parents didn’t even notice her, and she split off once outside, as the family headed toward the field where cars were parked in long rows.
Leaving the lights of the Big Top behind, she saw the cook top had disappeared. So had the blacksmith shop, the stable tent, and, from what she could see craning her neck, all the sideshow tents and the menagerie tent, too. She heard the noises of people shouting and, soon, behind her, of poles and canvas falling.
She didn’t like the shadows of the train yard. Down the line, she saw a man yanking two camels along by their ropes, a monkey riding on his shoulder. The horses were being loaded into a stock car. A clown was pulling the seal in a wagon, holding a herring just out of reach of its nose, and the tall man and the fat lady walked together toward one of the sleeper cars. Isabelle had explained that the Sax & Tebow Circus had no elephants. “Too small-time,” she’d said, with a shrug. “We can dream.”
Men Cecily didn’t know were walking by; train men, maybe. She hurried for the caboose, though, once she got there and climbed up onto the vestibule, she had an equally bad feeling about opening the door.
She glanced back at the shadows and made her choice, grabbing the metal handle and shoving her way inside. A lantern was burning on the table, but nobody was there. Cecily walked through the small kitchen area, past the stove and tiny icebox and small booth of table and benches, and into the middle compartment. Here, on one side, were two seats facing each other, while the other side had been made over into a tall bunk for sleeping, complete with a thin mattress and a railing, plus thick cushions lining it all around. This bunk had been constructed just for Cecily, Isabelle had explained. “We thought you’d think it was fun. Just be sure to hold on tight! Anyway, the cushions should keep you safe.” Isabelle’s bunk was in the compartment on the far end. “They made the caboose over just for me, and now I’m going to share it with you. It’s noisy and bumpy back here, but at least we’ve got a little privacy.”
Cecily grabbed her suitcase from where Mr. Tebow had set it this afternoon, then struggled to haul it up with her as she climbed the ladder to her bunk. Dolores and Flip were not going to believe this—her bed was in a train caboose with a clown painted on its side! Right under the cupola, so she could look out!
She got on her knees to peer out the window, but all she could see was darkness, and all the sounds were odd and disconcerting: the clanking of chains and rolling of wheels, the crack of a whip, the bellow of some animal, the shout of a discontented man.
It was a jarring thing to go from one life to another all in one day.
Cecily sank back down to sit cross-legged on the bunk, then unlatched her suitcase and opened it to take inventory in the dim light cast by the distant lantern.
Her thin nightgown, two pairs of clean underwear, and a dress that Cecily had never seen before. That was all Mrs. H. had packed for her.
Unless she’d slid a book into the inside pocket? (Not likely—but maybe Miss Oversham would’ve insisted.) Cecily ran her hand through. No book. But she felt a small, thick piece of paper. She pulled it out: a card with a picture of a bearded man wearing a crown, plus the caption, Hope begins with Saint Jude. In smaller print was written, The patron saint of lost causes.
She remembered: Her mother had told her that this had belonged to her daddy. She didn’t know how she could remember that, when she hadn’t seen the card in all the years she’d been at the orphanage, but she did. It seemed amazing that it was here. Something from her daddy.
She flipped it over. It said to pray to Saint Jude in cases that were despaired of, impossible, hopeless.
She sighed. She certainly was feeling all those things now. Her daddy was dead for sure, and look how Isabelle had reacted when Cecily had said her mother was coming back for her. Like it could never, ever be true.
Cecily felt tears welling. No, she told herself. No, she wouldn’t cry. She lay down, squirmed her way underneath the covers, then looked at the card again, into the eyes of Saint Jude. “What the blazes does prayer have to do with anything?” she asked him out loud. She’d never prayed to be adopted into the circus, and now here she was. She’d prayed and prayed for her mother to come back, and her mother never had.
On top of that, the people outside were tearing down the circus. By morning, Isabelle had said, they’d be in another town, with no trace of them left here. Every day was the same: another town, another pair of shows, another move on the train in the night. “Before you know it, we’ll be a thousand miles away,” Isabelle had explained.
“All the horses and people and tents and everything?” Cecily had asked, and Isabelle laughed and said yes, everything and everybody.
So how was Cecily’s mother ever going to find her now? Now that she was going to be traveling with the circus as “Jacqueline DuMonde”?
She tried to blink back the tears that came at that thought, but she couldn’t, not anymore, and her stomach was aching, too. Why would Isabelle and Mr. Tebow have such confidence that she could be “Jacqueline DuMonde,” bareback rider extraordinaire, when today was the first time she’d ever even met a horse? And what would happen if she couldn’t do what they expected? If she couldn’t learn the tricks, or understand all that she was supposed to?
Would they trade her in for some other orphan girl?
Well, that could be all right, if only she’d end up back with Flip and Dolores—
But the odds of that were pretty clearly exactly none, since the circus was leaving here tonight and wouldn’t be back for a year, according to Isabelle. Cecily would end up abandoned on the side of the tracks in Nebraska or Alabama or someplace she’d never even heard of.
All right, then.
She made herself stop crying. She wiped her face. She was just going to have to try. And try and try and try.
Anyway, Isabelle had proclaimed them sisters, and Cecily was not going to give up that chance.
She swallowed, imagining what Flip would say: We’ve all got to grow up someday. Guess what? Today’s your day.
If only Dolores were here, too, to tell Cecily what might happen next.
Cecily sighed, closed her eyes, and tried to imagine Dolores poking her shoulder to whisper in her ear.
Your mother will find you in Iowa, she heard her saying. She’ll know you despite your name.
Some time later, she struggled halfway out of sleep when she heard Isabelle’s voice: “I told her to come back here—”
And the man’s—Mr. Tebow’s—voice: “I swear to God, Isabelle, I thought I could trust you.”
Cecily didn’t open her eyes, but felt Isabelle boosting herself up nearby to look in the bunk. “Aw,” she said. “Out like a light. Poor kid must’ve been dead on her feet.” There came a sweet adjustment, a tucking around her, of the blanket, then Isabelle was gone, and Cecily’s face was wet with tears at the unexpected tenderness, and then she was asleep again.
And some time later, out of a different dream, she heard the train creak and rumble into motion.
And she was gone.