Blood and Circuses (7 page)

‘Now the other side,’ ordered Doreen, and Phryne found herself facing the outside of the ring, as Bell continued her smooth canter. ‘Again,’ ordered Doreen, and Phryne slid from one side to the other without falling. She grinned.

The scent of horse and sweat brought back the struggles which the young Phryne had endured learning to ride a cross-grained pony in the cool Shires. It had taken months before she had managed to get onto April the pony’s back, and stay there. April had not been patient with novices. By now, April would have taken Phryne over to the nearest gorse bush and flung her into it.

‘Back astride,’ Doreen commanded and Phryne regained her seat. ‘Now. You’ve got to trust me. Bell is moving fast enough to hold you in the saddle if you kneel. Just like swinging a billy round your head. Same thing. Put both hands flat either side of her neck and push your knees up onto her back. As long as you stay with your spine over the horse’s spine you can’t fall. One movement, make it smooth. Now.’

Phryne found the movement easy, though odd. She reflected that being educated by April had made her a good rider. Anyone who could stick onto April could ride anything and in any conditions. She was kneeling on Bell’s back, on all fours. She was just about to say, ‘How simple!’ when she found that it wasn’t. The horse slid out from beneath her and Samson hauled her up and onto Bell’s back again. The harness cut into her ribs. She concentrated. It was a matter of balance and trusting that Bell would not swerve or change pace. The rough horse hair chafed her inner thighs. She bit her lip.

The trick was to keep up a constant pressure with the knees. Four more circuits and she could kneel and not fall off. Doreen said, ‘All right. Now slowly lift your hands and straighten your back. You can’t fall. Try it.’ Phryne suppressed an unworthy urge to clutch at Bell’s mane and straightened her back. She balanced herself as she once had on a beam at school. Bell’s movements were as smooth as machinery. Phryne was kneeling up and the empty tent was flying past. She laughed aloud and wobbled perilously, then regained her balance. This was clearly no laughing matter.

‘Stay like that for a while,’ said Doreen, and Phryne and Bell completed two circuits. Phryne found that she could balance better with her arms outstretched. Alan Lee watched the slim figure with a private smile. Samson anchored the governing rope with careless strength. ‘Now you’re going to stand,’ said Doreen. ‘Put your hands down again, bring up your feet. Come up, Bell.’

This was going against every instinct of self-preservation and all Phryne had ever learned about horses. She fought an inner reluctance to do anything so foolish, pulled her knees in towards her chest and straightened her back. It did not want to straighten.

‘Feet further apart and flat. Good, you’re supple enough. Now, when I tell you, push down with your hands and stand up. Do it in one movement. You gotta flow, not jerk. You can do it. Come on.’

Phryne attempted to convince herself that it could be done and failed. Bell completed another circuit. Phryne began to sweat and her hands slipped on the chestnut hide. She lifted them, one by one, to wipe on her cotton dress.

‘You can do it,’ called Alan Lee.

‘I don’t think I can,’ wailed Phryne from her upside down position. Her thigh muscles twinged, presaging cramp.

‘Don’t think,’ said Samson. ‘I’ve got you. Hup!’ he roared, taking Phryne entirely by surprise, so that she had released her grip on Bell and was standing up, arms out, actually standing up on Bell’s back, with the ring fleeting past and some force holding her on.

Every rider is familiar with the drag of gravity as a horse jumps a fence. But this force did not pull her down. It appeared to be encouraging her to stay mounted. She noted from her perspective of the watchers that she must be leaning in towards the centre of the ring.

‘Good. Stick on,’ encouraged Doreen. ‘See? I told you anyone could do it. Try a handstand.’

Phryne, elated, bent again and laid her hands on the horse’s neck.

‘Not there—you’ll strain her neck. In the middle.’

Attempting to move back, Phryne lost her balance and fell. The governing rope brought her up short of the sawdust. Doreen brought Bell to a halt and stood caressing the soft nose.

‘Here’s your carrot, Bell. Fern? You all right?’

Phryne was sweaty, bruised by the canvas jacket and completely above herself.

‘Fine. I’m fine. Can we do it again?’

‘Yes,’ said Alan Lee. ‘And again every day. I reckon you’ll be able to stick on good-o by the time we get on the road again. See? I told you. And now you’re coming with us. You promised,’ he reminded her.

‘Yes, I promised. And I’ll come. Oh, that was lovely.’

‘Come back tomorrow,’ said Doreen. ‘Meanwhile, you need to practise handstands and balance. Alan can take you home and he’ll come and get you again. Now we gotta take Bell back to the lines and groom her. She did bonzer for you, Fern. But she’s the best. There ain’t many neddies with a pace like hers. Molly trained her up from a filly.’

Phryne led Bell out of the big top. Samson, having removed the governor, carefully detached it and undid his line, returning the hanging rope to exactly the same length and position.

‘Never meddle with a rope and never move it,’ said Alan Lee. ‘Someone’s life might depend on it. If you watch the flyers, you’ll see what I mean. But the Bevans don’t like an audience when they’re rehearsing. You’ll have to sneak into the show. You’ll see ’em put out a hand for a line, knowing that it’s there. If it ain’t there . . .’ he left a significant pause and Phryne nodded.

‘Quite. Who was Mrs Fantoccini?’

‘Why do you ask?’ Alan Lee seemed taken aback.

‘Jack Robinson said he arrested her for murdering Mr Christopher.’

‘Oh, yes. Well, she was one of the Flying Fantoccini. The husband and two brothers and Amelia Parkes and her sister Ella. They was good, too. Eh, Doreen?’

‘Good? They was great,’ said Doreen. ‘She never oughta married that bastard George, though. He treated her like a dog.’

‘And what happened?’

‘Look, this was ten years ago, I wasn’t here,’ said Doreen sharply. ‘I knew Amelia when we was kids together. I’da said she wouldn’t hurt a flea. But he knocked her about. Stole her money. They say . . .’ She lowered her voice and looked sidelong at Alan Lee and Samson, who took the hint and shifted out of earshot. ‘She told me that he made her have an illegal operation, you know, to get rid of a baby.’

‘Why?’ whispered Phryne. ‘Wasn’t she married?’

‘You can’t be a flyer if you’re expecting.’

‘That’s terrible!’

Doreen’s eyes glinted. Phryne noticed that her eyes were not green as she had thought, but a dark, almost charcoal grey.

‘Yair. And she wanted that baby real bad. But she loved him so she did it, and after that she was so scarred up inside she couldn’t never have another. She went strange then. Cold. You couldn’t get close to her. But I was away when it happened. Alan might know.

‘Alan?’ she called him over. ‘What about the murder?’

Alan Lee seemed uncomfortable. ‘I was here, yes, but I didn’t see it. Come along, we’d better get Bell back before her legs stiffen.’ As they walked, he began to tell the story in brief, unwilling sentences.

‘George had arranged a big finale. Six flyers all crossing each other, simple enough. But he insisted on his own trapeze; he had small hands and he needed a thinner bar. That night, they were all flying and he reached his bar and then he slipped. He fell. He fell outside the net, because he was at the top of his flight. Forty feet to the ground and he was dead. When they lowered his bar, they found it was smeared with engine grease. His wife, she had engine grease in her fingernails, and his brothers knew he’d been beating her. They knew about the baby, too.’ He grinned at Doreen. ‘You can’t keep secrets in a circus. And that day, he had been heard to tell her that he was short of money and that she should go on the street to earn him some, because that’s all she was worth. He called her a clumsy flyer and untrustworthy in the air. She killed him all right. She admitted it.’

‘And I can see why,’ observed Phryne.

They had traversed the carnie’s camp and were entering the horse lines when a tall man with white hair roared up to them.

‘You, what are you doing with my horse?’ he bellowed.

‘We had permission, sir,’ explained Alan Lee. ‘We are bringing her back now.’

‘You carnies are all horse thieves!’ yelled the tall man, face flushed with rage. ‘You put her back right now!’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Alan Lee submissively. Phryne wondered why he did not yell back at this rude person. Then she understood. Alan Lee, though delightful, skilled and beautiful, was low down on the circus pecking order, so he could not reply with the cut direct. His humbleness annoyed Phryne. She stared at the interlocutor, wondering what was eating him. He seemed unnaturally angry.

‘You stay in your own camp,’ he snarled. ‘I don’t want any of you diddikoi coming into my circus and stealing my animals and upsetting my people.’

‘I asked Mr Farrell,’ said Samson quietly. Samson was hard to overlook. He loomed over the man, broad as a door, and he was not smiling. ‘Mr Farrell said it was all right. We’re training a new rider for the rush. Why don’t you ask Mr Farrell about it?’ Samson asked with quiet menace.

The man cast a glance around the group, his eyes resting on Phryne.

‘You the new rider?’ Phryne remembered her place in the hierarchy of the circus and reined in her temper.

‘Yes, sir,’ she muttered, hanging her head.

‘What’s yer name?’

‘Fern, sir.’

‘You just remember who I am,’ he said pompously. ‘I’m Mr Jones and I own Farrell’s.’ He pinched Phryne’s cheek. ‘Nice little girl. You treat me right and I’ll treat you right.’

Phryne refrained from an answer but scuffed her soft shoe in the dust.

‘You get that horse back to the lines,’ Mr Jones ordered brusquely. ‘And mind you rub her down.’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Alan Lee again and they led Bell away.

‘Whew!’ said Phryne, as they were brushing Bell and feeding her more carrots. ‘What a tartar! I thought you said Farrell owned the circus?’

Alan Lee looked aside. Broad and well-tended equine sides hid them from eavesdroppers.

‘He did,’ he whispered. ‘Get over a bit, Bell, you’re crowding me. But this Jones has a half-share, they say. He ain’t popular.’

‘He ain’t,’ agreed Phryne.

Miss Parkes was served dinner in her cell. By negligence, someone had allowed her a knife. It was blunt but it could be sharpened. When the constable came to take the tray of untouched food, he did not notice that it was missing.

CHAPTER FIVE

All the world’s a stage
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances
And one man in his time plays many parts.

William Shakespeare
As You Like It,
Act II, Scene vii

‘A circus, Miss?’ Dot surveyed her employer, who was stripping off a shabby cotton dress and a leotard and examining her bruises. ‘Why?’

‘You remember Alan Lee.’

‘The gypsy, Miss?’

‘Yes, the gypsy. Except that he isn’t a gypsy, he’s half-gypsy. I have a lot to learn about circuses, Dot. They’re a lot more complicated than they look. They seem to have a class system. Circus folk at the top, carnival people in the middle, and gypsies at the bottom. Or that is how it seems at the present. Farrell’s has had a lot of trouble and they asked me to help—and I’m at a loose end, Dot. Nothing in the offing but social events, the occasional ball and flirting with all those tedious young men. I want something new to do and today I stood up on a horse’s back.’

‘But, Miss, I can’t come with you in a circus, can I?’

‘No, Dot dear.’ Phryne stepped into her bath and began lathering her rope burns with
Nuit d’amour
soap. ‘The girls don’t generally have a maid.’

‘But Miss . . .’

‘Oh dear, Dot, don’t take on! I can look after myself.’

‘But, Miss Phryne, who’ll run your bath and take care of your clothes and . . .’

‘I ought to be able to manage,’ muttered Phryne, and Dot produced her trump card.

‘Miss Phryne, it isn’t ladylike.’

Phryne swore. ‘Damn and blast all ladies to hell. No, I didn’t mean that. Come and talk to me, Dot, and don’t worry. I’ll be all right, and if I’m not it will be all my own fault, and I shall limp home and you can look after me and tell me every morning that I did it all to myself against your express advice. Agreed?’

‘I suppose so,’ said Dot. She was a small, plain young woman with long hair firmly suppressed in a plait. She was wearing a beige linen dress, embroidered with a bunch of bronze roses. Phryne sat up in the bath and began to count off points in her argument on soapy fingers.

‘All right, Dot. One, I agree that it is an escapade unworthy of my respected parent, the earl, and that my mother and sisters would have kittens if they knew. But they are all in England and with any luck no one will tell them. Two, it is very unlikely that anyone who knows me will see me. Three, if they do see me they are not going to recognise me because I shall have my hair covered and be made up and riding in a circus. Even if they notice it they won’t believe it. “Phryne Fisher,” they will say. “Doesn’t that girl look like the respected Miss Fisher? But of course it can’t be. It’s just a chance resemblance.”’

Phryne climbed out of the bath and Dot wrapped her in a moss-green velour towel.

‘Four,’ she continued, ‘I will be living with the girls so my virtue will be safe, rather more safe than I would like it to be, and five, I promise to be careful. And that’s all I am going to say about it, Dot. I will need some cheap clothes. Can you spare time this morning for a shopping trip?’

‘Yes, Miss,’ said Dot. ‘I don’t like it but if you promise to be careful . . . What do you like about circuses?’ she added curiously, dropping a crisp linen morning dress over Phryne’s sleek black head. ‘Nasty dirty places, all smells and noise and them poor animals all locked up in cages. I feel real sorry for them poor lions.’

‘I never thought about the lions,’ said Phryne, whisking a powder puff over her nose and applying Extreme Rouge lipstick. ‘I suppose it is tough on them. It’s not the animals, anyway, though I made the acquaintance of a mare today who would run all stockhorses to a standstill. Bell is her name. What a sweet creature. I must take some carrots, Dot, remind me. And apples. And a few packets of those extra strong peppermints. Horses love them. No, what’s fascinating about the circus is the people. And I don’t expect you to like them, Dot. They aren’t respectable.’