To read the future in palms and tea leaves is not to read the future at all. Rather it is to see the present with dizzying clarity.
The Bullet-Catcher’s Handbook
The Circus of Mysteries nurtured me from infancy, taught me the ways of the road and the stage. And when I could stay with it no more, the women and men of that troupe launched me into the world, though at great risk to themselves.
Among the many lessons of my childhood was to peer into the depths of the jossers’ mistrust. Those folk in whose towns and villages we pitched, who paid good money to attend our shows, could just as easily come with lighted torches to burn us in our caravans as we slept.
Thus it was our habit to send one or more of the company ahead by a day’s ride to gather intelligence and gauge the mood of each town. By a code of marks in chalk on gate posts on the approach, these outriders would warn us of their findings. Such men might pose as fruit pickers or navvies, depending on the season.
Or fortune-tellers, if they had that gift.
There could be no doubt that the gypsy woman was attached to Harry Timpson’s show. Her reaction to my question also told me that he was near. He would surely not return to the town so soon after leaving. Thus she could not be in the van of his company, but rather in the train.
Why he would leave people to watch a town after he had left it, I could not fathom. My question to the gypsy was valuable information, however. Harry Timpson would soon be informed that a young gentleman was trying to find him. I did not believe the fortune-teller had pierced my disguise.
In nodding when I had said the word “west” she had indicated the direction she wanted me to travel – though whether this was to lead me to his camp or to send me away from it, there was no way to tell.
Standing stock-still in the deep shadow of the yard behind the hotel, I waited and watched. Twice, servants had come and gone – a porter who’d hefted a crate of empty bottles and a chef who’d stepped outside to stretch in the cold air, the sweat steaming from his bare arms. Though I stood now alone, yet shadows shifted on the dimpled glass as people moved within. It seemed I would not have the chance to slip in through the back door, unobserved as I had left.
Stepping up the front steps of the Modesty Hotel, I felt glad of the dimness of the gas lamps in the lobby. The desk clerk made a small bow.
“May I help, sir?” he enquired.
“I’m here to meet Miss Elizabeth Barnabus, my sister.”
He ran his finger along the line of door keys, finding the gap where mine should have been hanging. “I’ll send a boy to call her,” he said.
“I wouldn’t want to wake her if she’s sleeping. Please don’t knock loud.”
The boy said he would not, then scampered away up the stairs.
It was only now that I caught sight of John Farthing, sitting at the back of the lobby, a newspaper open on his lap. He nodded and raised his hat.
“May I use the conveniences?” I asked the clerk.
Once out of sight around the corner of the corridor, I quickened my pace, taking the back stairs two at a time. Waiting out of sight on the second floor, I heard the boy knocking on my room door, a gentle tap as promised. After a moment he gave up and headed back towards the lobby. In five strides I was out of my hiding place, had slipped through the door and turned the key behind me.
In other circumstances I might have welcomed the attentions of the attractive John Farthing. But not this day. Unlocking the smaller of my cases, and pulling the false hair from my lip and cheeks, I began the transformation in reverse, watching my female face emerge in the small mirror as I wiped away traces of adhesive and dark pigment. Moving swiftly but surely, I folded my male clothes and unwrapped the chest binding, placing each item into the small case.
Outside the door a floorboard creaked. I pulled on a dressing robe and began brushing my hair out loose and long. A gentle tapping on the door sent my heart beating double time. I locked the case and hung the key around my neck so that it lay concealed where no gentleman would search.
The knock came again, louder this time.
“Who is it?” I called.
“I need to speak with you.” The voice was an urgent whisper.
“I am undressed, sir.”
“Please make yourself decent. This is the hotel manager.”
Lifting my small case to the wall, I covered it with an embroidered cloth snatched from the coffee table. Speaking to the door, I said, “Why do you call on me?”
“A man’s been seen prowling. I need to check your room for security.”
“I’m un-chaperoned.”
“The maid is with me,” he said.
Taking a deep breath, I unlocked the door and began opening a crack so that I could look through into the corridor.
He gave no warning. With a single abrupt movement, the door crashed full open and I was stumbling back, trying not to fall. Then he was inside and the door had closed behind him. I looked first to the face of John Farthing, then to the crossbow pistol he held in his hand, its needle-pointed bolt directed at my chest.
“I’m sorry,” Farthing said, reverting to his American accent. “Cooperate and we’ll have this over quickly.”
I made no reply, but backed away to match his advance.
“Where is he?” Farthing asked. His eyes swept the scene, taking in the cupboard, the gap under the bed, the small dressing room – all places where a man might hide. My hands felt the cold plaster of the wall behind me. My eyes flicked from the crossbow bolt to his trigger finger, resting against the side of the weapon, to his face. My mouth tasted sour from panic.
Farthing circled, bringing himself to the window, which he checked with his free hand. “Where?” he asked again.
“I’ll scream if you touch me,” I said.
“Don’t take me for a scoundrel, Miss Barnabus.”
Though his words were edged with determination, his aim had dropped from my chest to the floor. Stepping now to the small dressing room, he snatched a glance inside.
I managed to swallow. “Sir, you astound me!”
“I’m flattered if you were surprised,” he said. “But you’re not astounded or I’ve misjudged you. You say your brother arranged your lodgings?”
“He’s not here.”
Opening the cupboard, he ran a hand through my hanging clothes with practiced efficiency. “Then where?”
“I take it you’re a bounty hunter?”
“Wrong.”
“You’re most certainly a liar.”
“Very well,” he said. “Talk of lies then. You say you haven’t seen your brother, but he was in the lobby only minutes ago.”
“You’re mistaken.”
“I don’t think so. He has your eyes.” So saying, he knelt in one sudden movement, bringing himself low enough to see under the bed. Then he was up again, wearing a puzzled expression and rubbing his brow with his free hand. “Frankly, Miss Barnabus, your evasion is suspicious.”
“How can I evade with that thing pointed at me? Who’s paying you to do this?”
He perched himself on the corner of the bed and rested the crossbow pistol on his lap. “Being the one with the gun, it’s me who asks the questions.”
I took a sideways step and lowered myself into a chair, gripping the wooden arm rests.
“You’re not what you seem, Miss Barnabus. You travel with an invisible brother. You profess an interest in tombs and graves. Fashionable as that may be, it doesn’t fit with what I have seen of you.”
“Will you at least tell me your true name?” I asked.
“I’m not the accomplished liar you showed yourself to be on the airship flight,” he said. “My name is John Farthing, just as I said.”
“But you’re not what you seem.”
“What do I seem?”
“Then – a pleasant man. A witty travelling companion.”
“And now?”
“Not a hotel manager.”
“I’m sorry,” he said for the second time. “That was untrue. But I’d no other means of gaining entry without raising a cry.”
“Now you seem a bounty hunter,” I said. “A hired thug for a rich aristocrat.”
My words seemed to sting him. “I’m an agent of the law,” he said.
“The law of the Republic or the Kingdom?”
“Of the International Patent Office.” Then, perhaps noticing the way my grip had stiffened on the arms of the chair, he added: “Please don’t be afraid.”
How easily fear and anger may be confused.
It had been five years since the Duke of Northampton moved against my family. His method had been bribery, his chosen vehicle, a corrupt agent of the Patent Office.
The Circus of Mysteries was charged with some fabricated infringement. It took all of my father’s capital to pay the fine. The Duke then bought up our debts from various creditors – small sums individually but substantial when combined. His lawyer explained to the court that the Duke was a generous man and would accept a lifetime of my servitude in lieu of the money owed.
My father appealed, delaying the moment when I would be claimed, giving time for us to prepare and plan my escape. The saddlebags were packed and my costume laid out ready. But when word came that the Duke’s men-at-arms approached along the lane towards the gaff, the troupe were out pasting daybills in the villages around and no horses were left for me to ride.
Thus I ran.
The clay soil clung to my boots as I skirted the fields. With my feet as heavy as iron, I jumped ditches and ducked through gaps in thorn hedges. I carried only the set of man’s clothes I wore, a belt stuffed with coins and a bindle in which the food for my journey had been tied. The food had been planned for two days. My father could not have guessed it would need to serve me for ten.
The Duke was not to be easily cheated. Denied his prize and outraged, he ordered his men-at-arms out, not merely to track my path as we had feared, but to ride hard and cut off those roads I might have taken to the border.
When they ripped through our pitch and found me missing, they reported also that my brother was gone. Audience members from the previous night’s show had seen him on stage. They would later swear to it before the magistrate. But my brother hadn’t been seen since. Not by a josser nor any member of the troupe.
Thus it became known that he was the one responsible for cheating the Duke of the girl he had desired to own. In my flight I had broken no law. How may chattel commit a sin? The crime lay with my brother. He had taken from the Duke his rightful property. My brother was a thief, so to speak. Within days a good likeness of his face had been pasted on billboards throughout the border counties.
For myself, the Republic offered safety. When I finally waded the river north of Atherstone and dropped to my knees on the bank, exhausted from hunger and cold, I had moved beyond the Duke’s reach. The Republic recognised no man’s right to the ownership of another human being. But for my fictional brother things were different. Though the Duke, as an aristocrat, could not himself cross into the Republic, yet the men in his employment could come and go with the flourishing of a permit.
A diplomatic scandal would ensue if they kidnapped an innocent woman and rendered her across into the Kingdom. Border skirmishes had been fought over lesser crimes. But to snatch a wanted man, a criminal – this would raise no comment among the masses.
As for my father, I never saw him again. He died in the debtors’ prison.
“Tell the truth and there’s nothing to fear,” said Farthing, still sitting on the corner of my bed.
“You think me an accomplished liar?” I asked. “Look at me. Watch me say it: since arrival in Sleaford, I’ve not set eyes on my brother. I’ve not heard him speak. He’s sent me no message.”
John Farthing did look. His eyes held mine steadily as I spoke. They were not pure brown, as I’d thought before, but flecked with grey. “I can’t decide,” he said, “if you are such an accomplished liar as to be one of the most dangerous people I’ve ever met, or if you’re perhaps telling the simple truth. It’d be more comfortable for me to think you honest. In the airship I’d thought...” He shook his head.
“I have told the truth.”
“And yet I can’t help feeling there’s more you haven’t said.”
From his face, I knew the decision had been made but not which way it had gone.
“Up,” he said, gesturing with the crossbow pistol. “You’ll need clothes for a night journey.”
He had given no sign of noticing my travelling case of male disguises hidden beneath the embroidered cloth. Its discovery would be a disaster. Thus I used misdirection to draw his eye – a show of fluster and embarrassment as I lifted my other case onto the bed and selected a set of under garments. It would have been too obvious to fool a conjuror, but Farthing seemed taken in. He blushed as I gathered bloomers, camisole and corset. These, together with a blouse, skirt and shawl from the cupboard, I took to the small dressing room, closing the door behind me.
“I’ll hear if you slide the bolt,” he said.
“The world will hear if you try to force yourself on me!”
“You mistake me,” he said.
“What else am I supposed to think?”
There were a few seconds of silence before he spoke again. “Please talk to me as you change.”
The window of the dressing room being ajar, I peered out and cast my eye up and down the wall of the hotel. A drainpipe ran from the gutter just above me all the way to the rear yard, some thirty feet below. People used to say that children raised in the Circus of Mysteries were deprived of a proper education. But there are some things an acrobat can teach you that a Latin master never could.
“Talk!” ordered Farthing.
“Of what?”
“Of anything so that I know where you are. Tell me where you were born.”
“We haven’t been introduced,” I said, reaching out to grip the drainpipe – cast iron, it seemed, painted over and smooth to the touch. Testing it, I felt it shift a fraction, though not too much to alarm me. Back inside and away from the window, I quickly began to change, pulling my corset around me and hooking the eyes at the front.
“Not introduced?” he said. “You remind me of your lie in the air carriage. Will I regret believing your brother didn’t make it to your room? I ask again, where were you born?”
“In the Kingdom,” I said, unrolling my stockings up my legs.
“Why is your voice strained?”
“You wish me to give an account of my under garments? Is this for your work, Mr Farthing, or for your pleasure?”
“I... Forgive me. Where in the Kingdom?”
“I don’t know.”
“A foundling?”
“A daughter of loving parents.”
“Your father’s profession?”
“Are you thinking of proposing marriage?”
He made a noise like a cough, and I remembered how he had used just such a sound to cover his laugh in the air carriage. After a moment he said, “You have a way of steering the conversation, Miss Barnabus. I don’t know if you do it to avoid answering or merely to rile me.”
“I’m not accustomed to being questioned as I dress! It flusters me.”
“Your father?” he asked again.
“Ringmaster of a travelling show.”
Our conversation had passed back and forth like a tennis ball but now it paused.
“I may think you more of a liar for admitting such an upbringing,” he said at last.
“Ironic that you’d like me to lie so that I might seem trustworthy!”
“Why is this taking so long?” he asked, his voice coming from close to the door, as if his ear were pressed against it.
“I take it you’re not a married man, Mr Farthing. Else you’d know what women must go through as we dress!”
“You’re right,” he said. “I’m not. And I apologise.”
“For the lies or the threats?”
“They’re tools of my office. But if I’ve gone beyond the professional... I’m sorry.”
That was the third time he’d said it. Agents of the Patent Office should be made of sterner stuff. It occurred to me that were I to weep, the sound might dislodge him from his equilibrium. He would try to find calming words to speak through the door. I would run water into the basin, as if composing myself and washing the tear tracks away. Twenty seconds from my silence, he would begin to suspect. Ten seconds beyond that he would burst through the door to see me clambering down the drainpipe. I would have slipped into the night before he could run the stairs and reach the ground floor to give chase.
“Miss Barnabus?” he called. “Please speak.”
The drainpipe felt too smooth for a reliable grip. And to find answers we must sometimes turn to face those who would chase us. Thus I opened the door and stood before him, fully dressed.
“Please don’t present your actions as virtue, Mr Farthing. I’ve nothing but contempt for you and for the office you serve.”