Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

PT Barnum doesn’t know it yet, but he is going to bitterly regret this.

He rolls back the paneled door to his study, nothing on his mind but bringing his insomnia to bear on the investor report, and there’s Phillip Carlyle, working by the light of a lantern with his collar and cuffs askew, right hand tucked under his jacket, glaring at the paper-strewn coffee table with an Old Judge cigarette clamped between his teeth.

“Phillip.” Barnum is used to seeing his partner at any and all hours—that’s circus life, and, to be honest, their lives in general—but as far as he knows, an actual break-in is unprecedented. “What…”

“Almost done.” The cigarette jigs between Phillip’s lips as he scribbles awkwardly with his left hand. He looks strangely undone in that fitful light, stubble-cheeked and underslept. “As soon as we close out June, we can do the final draft.”

“The final…” Barnum doesn’t smell liquor on the air, but he’s not sure how else to explain this. Typically when they split the morning’s first pot of coffee, it’s because one of them has passed out on the other’s couch—the one being Phillip, the couch being Barnum’s. Late nights are in the Carlyle blood, not early mornings. “Is that the investor report? And…are you smoking?”

“Maybe I’d like to blow smoke for a change,” Phillip mutters around the butt.

“You only smoke when you’re afraid you’ll drink.” When Phillip doesn’t answer, Barnum rolls the door shut and strides over. He covers the papers with one hand—that is the investor report—and waits until Phillip meets his eyes. “What’s going on?” he half-whispers, conscious of his family asleep above them. “Are you in some kind of trouble?”

Plucking the cigarette from his lips, Phillip unfurls a streamer of smoke. “You always said to come here, day or night, if I ever needed anything,” he says after a moment. He crooks a smile. “Well, I’m here.”

And what exactly is he supposed to say to that? Any day or night but this one? Congratulations on finally doing something I told you to do, but don’t bother an insomniac before his first cup of coffee? This is what he always said he wanted: that his children, de facto or otherwise, would know they could come to him when in trouble.

The circus has grown a lot in six years. At this point, Charity just kicks him awake and rolls over to her side of the bed.

“I’m not drunk, if that’s what you’re thinking.” Phillip’s cornflower eyes flicker in the lamplight. “I just need a pair of steady hands.”

“Steady hands?” He’s forgotten how much he hates this. “For what?”

Phillip looks at him. “Don’t panic,” he says, pulling his hand out of his jacket. He lifts away the lap, and the bottom drops out of Barnum’s stomach.

“Why didn’t you tell me Anne was back?”

Barnum glances up from the shirt buttons. His partner half-reclines on the study couch with his arms slung along the back, jacket and suspenders discarded, cigarette dangling from his bloody hand. His usual poise is in force, but under that tumble of mussed coif, he looks strangely young and defenseless.

“Maybe I thought you’d do something crazy.” Freeing the last button, Barnum gingerly exposes the smoothly muscled side. “This, for example.”

Phillip snorts inelegantly. “It’s a paper cut, PT,” he says as Barnum probes the slash over his left hip. Only an inch long but deep, deep enough to still be bleeding.

“Phillip, if this is your idea of a paper cut, we’re switching to parchment.” Shifting forward on the coffee table, Barnum pops the clasps on the medical kit he keeps out of sheer paranoia. “Next you’ll tell me you gutted yourself with a thumbtack.”

As he selects a needle and a roll of catgut, the younger man leans his head back on the couch. “I was fencing,” he says to the ceiling. “With an old friend.”

Barnum glances up again. “Isn’t that the one where men in expensive pajamas try to impale each other?” he asks when Phillip doesn't elaborate.

Phillip's lips twitch. “First blood,” he says dryly, “and you should hear what they do in Germany. It’s a common gentleman’s sport, PT. I’ve been doing it since I was twelve.”

“Then you played your cards close to the vest.” Barnum sets aside the kit. “I had no idea you fenced. Not a clue.”

“I haven’t done it much since you shanghaied me.” Phillip’s features tighten imperceptibly as Barnum flips up the lantern glass. “I lived a whole life before I met you. I was miserable and so was my liver, but I could excise a spleen in three swipes.”

Now there’s an idea. If this circus thing doesn’t pan out, they could always open up a surgical theatre. PHIN & PHIL’S STAB ‘N’ STITCH: ORGANS REMOVED BEFORE YOUR VERY EYES. “I think six or seven,” Barnum decides as he turns the needle in the flame. “Maybe eight if I space it right.”

“Been a while?” Phillip quips.

“Ten years, give or take.” Setting down the needle, Barnum snips off a length of catgut. “Helen was three. Cut her arm on a broken bottle.”

That earns him a frown. “You didn’t take her to a doctor?”

“Sure, and he said I was more than welcome to come back as soon as the money tree ripened.” Barnum plucks his spectacles from his breast pocket and goes about threading the needle. “This is going to hurt.”

At the first prick, Phillip sips a quick breath. “Easy,” Barnum mutters. Yes, easy—take it easy while a tailor’s boy sews you up like the Thanksgiving goose.

As the first stitch clears, Phillip exhales slowly. “When did Anne get back?” he asks, gazing at the ceiling with the engrossment of a dilettante in the Sistine Chapel.

“She showed up here three nights ago.” Barnum impales him a second time; Phillip’s belly tightens reflexively. “I wired her the train fare.”

“She couldn’t pay for her own ticket?”

“Long way from Georgia.” He thinks seven. Damn it.

“Anne never spent a cent she didn’t have to.” Phillip’s knuckles grip the cigarette like knees on a restive horse. “They’ve only been married a year. Where did all her money go?”

That’s an excellent question, probably attached to a terrible answer. “I guess you’d have to ask her,” Barnum says as he puts in the third stitch. “For what it’s worth, I don’t think he hurt her.”

“Then why did she leave?”

“Because sometimes people just have to leave, Phillip.” It comes out sharper than intended. “As long as she’s not bruised or bleeding, I’ll take it as a win.”

Phillip mutters something. “What was that?” Barnum asks, though he heard him perfectly well. His spectacles might be seeing more of the world lately, but there’s nothing wrong with his ears.

“I said,” Phillip repeats more loudly, “that’s easy for you to say.”

How sweet of him to redact you hypocritical bastard. “You’re just lucky he divorced her,” Barnum growls, jabbing him a little harder on the fourth stitch. He hardly needs to remind him that he knows exactly what it’s like to watch the love of your life walk out of it—only in his case, he had to watch her walk out with his children. “Try fighting a Southern lawyer on the subject of his property.”

“He’s Black,” Phillip mutters.

“Can’t quote the price of tea in China, but I’m pretty sure assholes come in all colours.”

A beat passes. “Is she staying?”

“I don’t know, Phil.” God, he’s tired. “All I know is she’s holed up with her brother.”

A minute later he ties off the last stitch—the eighth, he’s pleased to report. “Done,” he announces, snipping off the catgut and putting down the needle. He hands Phillip a clean handkerchief. “All right?”

Phillip nods at the ceiling. “Then I’m confiscating your smokes,” Barnum informs him, snagging the pack from Phillip’s breast pocket. Tapping the last stick into his palm, he tosses the box. “I wish you’d quit these things,” he mutters as he lights up. Steady during the stitching, his hands now tremble minutely. “I read somewhere they might make people sick.”

“You’re smoking,” Phillip points out.

“Son, you’re likelier to get me killed than anything made by the hand of man.” Stretching his legs to pop his knees—they go off like gunshots—Barnum strips off his spectacles and thumps into the adjacent armchair. “So,” he says as Phillip begins buttoning his ruined shirt. “Who’s the old pal with the letter-opener?”

Phillip’s nimble fingers stumble. “I’ve told you about Eric Thorne,” he says without looking up.

Phillip has told him many things over the years. He’s told him about the Platonic principles and John Keats and the Gordian knot and the history of tax laws in Connecticut. He’s told him about the first sewing machine and his revulsion for watercress and the legend of the swan song and the time WD Wheeler knocked him down behind the big top because he snapped at Anne. He’s told him that his father once caned him until he cried and a boy named Noah Oliver took his virginity in a garden shed and he set a steeplechase record at Harvard on an Arabian named Apollo and he once considered cutting his wrists in the dormitory bath but he went to class instead because he wanted the lecture on Kant.

Phillip has told him many things. He has not told him about Eric Thorne.

“He was the one who got us the invitation to see the Queen.” Leaving the last two buttons undone, Phillip looks up. “I told you I had to pull a few strings. In point of fact, he pulled them for me.”

“Let me guess.” Barnum breathes smoke. “You sold your soul for that particular favour.”

“No, but I took out a pretty hefty mortgage.”

It’s the same bitterly ironic tone Barnum first heard six years ago outside a theatre, watching a miserable young swell nip 80-proof vodka from a flask. He hates that tone. “And he’s…what now?” He gestures dramatically with his cigarette. “Taking payment in pounds of flesh?”

Instead of retorting, Phillip turns and stares out the black square of window, visibly receding into his own head. That’s pretty gnarly terrain to get lost in at three in the morning, but fortunately, Barnum happens to be the chief cartographer.

“All right, so, let’s connect a few of these dots, shall we?” He taps his cigarette over the ashtray. “Somehow, you found out Anne was back. Not from Charity or the circus; they wouldn’t betray her even to you. So you probably ended up here that night for some reason, which isn’t exactly a long shot given that we’ve been pulling all-nighters for a month. Hot or cold?”

Judging by the eyes peeking balefully from under that dark fringe, he’s at least warm. “You never did come in,” he continues, “so I’m guessing you saw her through the window and lost your shit a little. But you didn’t go to a bar or you’d still be there, so I’m going to go out on a limb and say you paid a visit to your old friend Eric Thorne.” He cocks his head at a suspicious twitch. “He wasn’t in the city?” Another twitch. “Well, he couldn’t have been out of the country.”

“He’s been living in Europe since we were sixteen,” Phillip murmurs, tracing a crease in his trousers with one thumb.

“Fine, but he didn’t cross the Atlantic in three days, so he must already have been stateside. Now, rail travel has progressed mightily since I first laid track, but the timeline suggests he was somewhere in the Northeast, possibly the Midwest.”

“Philadelphia,” Phillip sighs.

He may be a week from his forty-ninth birthday, but gut instincts age like fine wine. “You knew he was there because you were the one who brought him back to America,” he goes on, relishing his friend's incredulous stare. “I haven’t forgotten that little talk you and I had in this very study last year. You were going to dig around in your old theatre contacts, see if you could find Caroline an agent, maybe give her career a boost. We haven’t discussed it since, but when Phillip Carlyle says he’ll do something, he does that thing or dies trying. And who better to promote a Barnum than the man who’s already proven he can do it?”

“In other words, you’re not buying that Anne Wheeler and Eric Thorne just happened to return within days of each other.”

“I can’t guess why Thorne took so long to return to America, or why he didn’t come straight to New York,” Barnum goes on, ignoring that insolent little smirk. “But obviously something changed his mind. Possibly a telegram from an old friend desperate for moral support in the romance department. Possibly just the lure of making money off New York's most accomplished ballerina. Either way, he left Philadelphia three days ago and came here. And the grand conclusion I draw from all of this is that you’re in my study on this particular morning because Caroline’s last performance as Giselle is tonight and you bought Eric Thorne a ticket.”

The thunderstruck silence is extremely gratifying. “That,” Phillip says at last, raising astonished eyes to his, “is why you’ll never need to be good at chess to win.”

“I hope you know what you’re doing, Phillip.” Barnum’s fingers blanch on his cigarette. “An older man…”

“My age.”

“An older man,” Barnum enunciates, “whom I’ve never met, who’s made more stars than God, who has just stabbed you…wants to Jenny-Lind my teenage daughter.”

“To be her agent,” Phillip corrects. “To recommend her to Marius Petipa.” He hesitates. “That’s…”

“I know who that is, Phillip.” Marius Petipa, as in the Imperial Russian Ballet Marius Petipa. Good God.

“It’s the chance of a lifetime,” Phillip says quietly as Barnum leans over to stab out his cigarette. “She’ll never get another break like this.”

“Yeah, that’s what I told Jenny,” Barnum mutters.

“Look, I understand how you feel…”

“Do you?” Barnum fires back, turning to him. “Do you, Phillip?”

“Do I feel protective of a girl I love like a sister?” Phillip lets that hang between them. “If you don’t want to go for it, that’s fine, but you did ask me to find someone. This particular someone already helped you once. And I hate to put this fine a point on it, but you only poached me from the theatre biz because Caroline was having so much trouble with her last name. Because I had connections. I mean,” he laughs a little, “did you think I pulled an invitation to Queen Vicky out of a top hat?”

Not precisely, but it happened before Barnum understood the perils of power, and afterward he wanted nothing more than to forget the whole fiasco. “And what do you get out of it?” he shoots back, shifting uneasily in his chair.

“You mean besides helping my little sister and repaying an old favour? Next time Eric and I fence, we fence épée instead of foil.” Phillip shrugs ruefully. “Épée is my preferred style. The counterattacks are vicious, you can strike below the belt, and you can knock your duelist around pretty much at will.”

In other words, it’s perfect for a cunning little fox with a low centre of gravity. “I know what your family means to you,” Phillip says quietly as Barnum rubs his eyes. “But I don’t think I need to tell you what your family means to me. If even one hair on their heads fell to the ground on my account, I would consider my life the only fit repayment. So will you trust me to give her this chance? Will you trust me, PT?”

Barnum looks at him then—resting face sad and slightly perplexed, possibly at itself—and sees for the first time the ghosts of crow’s-feet in the corners of the eyes, dread whispers of a young man’s mortality. Time calls every loan, but there’s something about being thirty-five and feeling like you’re running out of chances to get it right. The labour-worn paddock boots printing his carpet have carried Phillip Carlyle here tonight with a battered heart and a fencing wound and perhaps the only thing he still possesses of value to this cruel world: friendship with a man who makes things happen. And he offers it without reservation for the happiness of Barnum’s sixteen-year-old daughter, the way he first offered it to a red-coated troubadour who needed a friend in high places.

Turns out, he's a pretty good friend in low places, too.

“Yes.” Barnum looks him in the eye. “You’re my fifth ace, Phil, the only plan B I ever had. So yes, I trust you. With more than this.”

Phillip breaks into a smile then, one of his real ones, too spontaneous to be anything but genuine, and as it scatters its blinding light over the study, those ghosts imprint themselves on Barnum’s memory—not as an afterimage but a negative, all the brights turned dark and all the darks turned bright.

In time, a good many things will look that way.

Chapter Text

“Nice dress, Peanuts.”

The giggles of Caroline Barnum’s fellow ballerinas trail away toward the Winthrops’ massive ballroom, leaving her alone with the marble echoes. Her fists are locked in the skirts of her snowy, sequined ball gown as she stands frozen in the corridor; the crimson stain of Evangeline Winthrop’s upended wine glass soaks her lap. Not an hour ago, she delivered a performance as Giselle that brought the entire theatre to its feet. Now, the ruin of the dress she and her mother picked out for the afterparty with such pride will be the only thing anyone remembers.

She turns slowly, casting about in the old aimless way, and finds her reflection turning to meet her in a gilt-edged mirror. She stares at herself, amazed to see her face so dry, her supple form so poised. Her rage has always been hidden, a years-long magmatic groundswell with no vent, but tonight the eruption simmers just below the surface. And as she looks at the feminine version of her father looking back—her own features elegant and slightly upswept, eyes sparkling whiskey, a burnished fall of auburn hair under a faux-diamond netting—she sees how doomed she is to ever escape his legacy.

Her hand closes around a candelabra. With a scream, she lifts it and smashes the glass, shattering her reflection into a thousand stinging fragments. Tossing it away, she covers her face with her hands and waits for the condemnation. But silence reigns over the hall except for distant bursts of gaiety from the ballroom, one after the other like gunshots.

“Miss Barnum? Good Lord, are you all right?”

She turns, and just like that her world stops, and she slips and falls off the edge before she even knows it’s there. She’s never seen him but she knows who he is, this impeccably-tailored Adonis with sea-green eyes and a nest of sunny curls and an intelligent face of almost tortuously keen angles. If not for the single stray lock falling carelessly over his high brow as he strides toward her, his feline athleticism would carry a hint of the lethal, his haughty couture a touch of the cruel.

But not for her. Never in that face. Never in those eyes.

“My dress.” Her own voice sounds distant as Eric Thorne directs every sense to himself. “I'm supposed to make a grand entrance, but it’s...it's…”

“Ruined, yes, I see.” Thorne’s inflection is delightfully peculiar: very nearly European, but exerting a telling American force on its consonants. “Miss Barnum, tell me that’s not blood.”

“It’s wine.” He’s staring at her dress, but she can’t stop staring at his face. “I’m not allowed to drink, but Evangeline Winthrop...she dumped it…”

He darts a glance up at her face. “Roland Winthrop’s granddaughter?” he asks, and then he astonishes her with a clear and ringing laugh. “What, the ringleader of The Four Hundred’s entitled vixens?”

Her heart sinks. “You know her?”

“Only from orchestra left, but he owns half of New York, and I grew up with his son Samuel.” Thorne’s lips purse wryly. “I assure you, she comes by it honestly.”

“She’s hated me for years. She always used to tell me I smelled like…” It seems so silly spoken out loud. “Like peanuts.”

“Ah, the perfume of success offends her delicate olfactories.” Grinning rakishly, Thorne extends his hand. “Eric Thorne,” he introduces himself, pressing a gentle kiss to the back of hers. “It’s a pleasure to meet you at last, though I believe you know me by reputation.”

“I heard about Phillip’s stitches,” she admits, accepting the return of her hand reluctantly.

“I admit I cut him a little deeper than was strictly necessary, but in my defense, he bumped me in a no-contact bout.” Exposing perfect teeth, Thorne tosses his hat and gloves on the table under the broken mirror. “And don’t you imagine it was an accident. Now,” he says, crossing his arms over his broad chest, “what is the genesis of this unfortunate soilage?”

“We were fighting. My mother always tells me to let what she says roll off my back, but tonight…” Another comber of laughter rolls out from the ballroom. “She called Phillip a drunken, sodomizing peanut-peddler,” she says in a half-whisper. “And my father…”

Thorne’s eyes narrow to slits as she falls silent. “What did she call your father?” he asks with a smile that has nothing in common with joy.

Tears fill her eyes. “The Lind Lout,” she whispers, and her fingernails dig furrows in her palms.

A muscle jumps in Thorne’s jaw. He looks toward the ballroom, resplendent like her father’s circus but cold, all its lights utterly devoid of warmth, and suddenly she sees him as a silhouette against its brilliance, a shadow within a shadow, burning with dark heat. Then he turns back to her, all bright again, and asks, “Miss Barnum, would you care to dance?”

If he had dumped a pot of hot coffee on her head, she could not have been more astonished. No one has ever asked her to dance. No one except her father and Phillip, and that doesn't count. “I…I can’t,” she stammers. “My dress…” She twitches the stained skirt.

“Of course, what was I thinking?” Thorne plucks an abandoned glass of red wine off a polished table. “To make it acceptable, first we must make it a trend.”

Without further ado, he dumps the wine over the breast of his pristine white shirt. “Oh!” Caroline half-shrieks as he spreads his arms like a showman, clapping her hands to her mouth. “Mr Thorne, you can’t do that.”

“I just did.” He presses a hand to his soiled breast, painting the palm crimson. “Over my heart,” he says quietly, “because your tears have cut it to the quick.”

Her cheeks warm pleasantly. “Miss Barnum, how do you feel about aiding and abetting a little revenge?” he inquires, setting down the empty glass.

“Isn’t revenge wrong?”

“Is it right for them to call your father a lout and your brother a sodomist?” Thorne leans in and she catches a heady whiff of expensive cologne. “No blood, I promise. We’ll just…prick their pride a little.”

That doesn’t sound so terrible. “What are we going to do?” she asks, slipping her arm into the crook of his proffered elbow.

“Put on a show.” Thorne hums critically. “How tall are you, Miss Barnum?”

“Five-ten,” she sighs.

“Six-one.” He leans in, and her stomach flutters the way it does before a big performance. “In the art of dipping,” he says conspiratorially, “they say three inches is the perfect differential.”

She laughs, blushing under his weighted gaze that seems to say more than his lips. “Shall we?” he invites, a mysterious little smile playing over his lips, and at her nod he sweeps her toward the ballroom.

As if chilled by the sudden gust of their arrival, the whole room turns. Through the hammering pulse dizzying her vision, Caroline sees Phillip and her lavender-gowned mother frozen in what appears to be a frantic conference about her absence, her younger sister staring at her with her jaw unhinged in typical unladylike abandon, her father pausing mid-pivot in the act of raking both hands through his hair. Every eye is on her. Every ear is listening. This moment is hers. She doesn't know what to do with it.

“Head up, eyes forward.” As they advance into the room, Eric Thorne obeys his own advice, looking haughtily down his aquiline nose at the gaping faces staring back. “Remember: you are the vision of all they aspire to be.”

It sounds like something her father would say. But nothing he’s ever said has stirred her as Eric Thorne’s voice is stirring her now. Not until this moment did she know what it meant to come alive.

He parts the crowd before her with a cool glance, every footfall firm, every stride assured. Evangeline Winthrop huddles with a knot of ballerinas, some of them whispering, all of them ducked behind fluttering fans. As the two of them draw near, the other girls fall away from the Winthrop heiress, and Caroline instinctively tries to do the same, remembering a thousand clashes that ended in defeat.

“Remember what she called your father,” Eric Thorne whispers, and Caroline lifts her chin high, because she may have grown up in a slum but she was raised among her father’s stars.

“Miss Winthrop, I presume?” Thorne mirrors Evangeline Winthrop’s mute nod. “Yes, you’re the utterly inferior soloist who danced Myrtha in the second act. Now,” he says, gazing amusedly down at her, “I know the woman is a merciless hellcat who delights in dancing men to death, but good God, mademoiselle, need you have taken your role so literally?”

Evangeline Winthrop’s painted lips part in soundless horror. As Roland Winthrop starts toward them, bending his grandfatherly glare on them, Thorne lifts his lip in his direction to expose a wicked canine, and the exalted magnate just…stops.

Eric Thorne turns back to Evangeline Winthrop. “I have seen Giselle danced in every theatre house in Europe,” he continues in that sultry tone, “and I can honestly say that Miss Barnum’s rendition tonight was peerless. Her performance would have been divine in any light, but next to your guttering candle, her rising star has attained a luminosity that will one day earn her the principal part in any company she desires.” He smirks. “I guarantee it. For I, mademoiselle, am personally acquainted with Marius Petipa, and my recommendations are invariably well-received.”

As the crowd audibly reacts to this august name, Thorne makes Evangeline Winthrop an icy little bow. Then he turns her toward the little knot of Caroline's family, all of them staring at her as if they’ve never seen her before. “Mr Barnum,” Thorne says quietly, inclining his head. “Mrs Barnum.” He flicks a wink at Phillip. “Carton.”

Before Caroline can wonder what that’s about, her mother covers her mouth with both hands. “Oh Caroline,” she whispers through her fingers, tears in her eyes. “Oh, your dress…”

“A trifling accident with a wineglass, madam, nothing worse.” Thorne turns to her father. “With your permission, sir,” he says quietly, “I would like to show these classless troglodytes what they’ve been missing all these years.”

She’s never seen her father thrown so blatantly on his back foot. “I…I don’t…” he stammers, turning to her mother with his eyes blow wide. “Chairy…”

“It’s all right, Phineas.” Her mother squeezes his arm, but even she looks uncharacteristically thrown. “We’re right here.”

He hesitates, turning to Phillip on his other side, and Phillip stares back at him, looking nearly as adrift as he is. “There’s nothing improper about it,” he says lamely as Helen regards Eric Thorne with a look she normally reserves for people who deny passing gas. “I don’t see a problem.”

“Go on, then,” her father relents after a final glance at her mother. Overcome with a swell of happiness—when did the rage turn into this all-consuming joy?—Caroline raises herself on her toes to kiss her father's cologned cheek, smoothing away the hints of lipstick with her gloved hand. He offers her a crooked smile, and then he spears Thorne with a look that promises hellfire for the slightest transgression.

As Thorne angles her toward the dance floor, Phillip catches his sleeve. “Eric…” he starts, and she thinks in the vague way of persistent minutiae: He calls him Eric but Eric calls him Carton. Why?

“Don't worry, old dog, no new debts.” Thorne passes him a fresh wink. “This is merely old thanks.”

And then he sweeps her onto the dance floor, leaving them all behind.

“Maestro,” he instructs with the haughty grace of a man accustomed to deference, and as the dignified old conductor bows, Eric Thorne draws her in with a hand on her waist. “Trust me,” he whispers in her ear, and the first notes fill the air like the exotic musk of his cologne, and they’re in a room full of people but none of them exist. And then…

And then…

And then…

She flies.

That night, they raise the roof for PT Barnum’s birthday and Caroline Barnum’s success.

“You knew we were doing this tonight, right?” Phillip has to raise his voice to be heard over the cacophony of revelling Oddities. Wallsey’s bar—his real name is Buford Wallen, and they all like him and his moustache too much to use it—has been a refuge for the circus folk almost since the beginning. On nights like this, he lets them rent the whole place for half-price.

“Same way I know you remit all our payments a week early.” Barnum glances at Caroline, glittering and glowing as she relates the night’s triumph to a circle of goggling Oddities. At the packed bar, Eric Thorne is delivering a lively anecdote about a hapless waiter at a Grand Canal café. “Of course,” he adds, turning back to the chess game, “no one thought we’d have this much to celebrate.”

"Well," Phillip grumbles, "at least something about this party is a surprise," and Barnum chuckles.

Still laughing at some joke or other from Charles Stratton, Charity wanders over to their table. “Who’s winning?” she asks, weaving her arms around her husband’s neck from behind. Blond flyaways frame her face girlishly, belying the faint silver in her tresses.

“That depends what game we’re playing.” Phillip frowns at the pieces. “I’m playing chess, but I’m pretty sure your husband’s playing Devil Take the Hindmost.”

“Phineas, are you cheating again?” Charity tsks against her husband’s ear, and Phillip chuckles at the sudden gleam of interest in Barnum’s eyes. Unless he’s mistaken, the two of them are going to get very, very lucky tonight.

“The only person I promised not to cheat was you.” Barnum glances up at his wife, and his face softens with a grin. “How many glasses have you had, doll?” he asks fondly, his big hand rubbing her slender arm.

“I may be slightly tipsy, my darling.” Charity taps his nose with one tapered finger, drawing a husky chuckle. “But at least I’m not Melchizedek.”

That sounds more meaningful than it should. “Melchizedek?” Phillip prods, intrigued by the wicked gleam in Charity’s eyes and Barnum’s exasperated eye roll. “What’s that, the name of your hypothetical son?”

“And the reason I prayed for girls.” Charity serves him the wry look that forms the bread and butter of their communication. “I told God I would rather be barren than subject an innocent boy to a name like that.”

“Melchizedek son of Phineas,” Phillip muses. “Yes, I see your point.”

“Would you just…” Barnum cracks a broad grin. “Why are you even here?”

“You picked me up in a bar.” Phillip moves his knight. “Check.”

“I picked you up off the floor of a bar.” Barnum moves his own knight diagonally. “Checkmate.”

“Excuse me, that is not a move.” Phillip points at the offending piece as Charity snickers. “With a checkers pawn, yes, but that is a knight, and we’re playing chess.”

“On a checkerboard.” Barnum’s grin acquires a few more teeth. “On which that is the only valid move. Therefore…checkermate.”

Phillip throws a slain pawn at his chest. “Phineas, his stitches,” Charity warns with a smile as two size-fourteen feet snake around the leg of Phillip’s chair.

Barnum reluctantly relents. “I assume this is revenge for me arranging your daughter's first dance,” Phillip says as Charity wanders away again to watch Lettie Lutz play poker with the Lord of Leeds.

“I’m grateful to the man.” Barnum begins righting the pieces. “I don’t have to like him.”

“Are you being petty or is there an actual, specific reason?”

“He humiliated that girl.” Barnum’s jaw tenses. “Don't much care for it.”

It’s hard to argue when he doesn’t fundamentally disagree. “You’re sympathizing with the Winthrops now?” is all he can find to say.

“It’s not sympathy.” Barnum shoots him a grim look. “Evangeline Winthrop is sixteen, Phillip. A horrible person, granted, but she was raised to be that way. She shouldn’t have received her comeuppance at the hands of a full-grown man.”

“He’s used to playing hardball,” Phillip says, shifting uneasily. “That’s the business. There’s more to him than that.”

“Maybe, but in my experience, there’s only one thing you really need to know about a person.” Leaning forward, Barnum folds his hands on the table with a dark smile. “What do they want to hear?”

“Oh, come on…”

“Take our partnership.” Barnum on a roll is harder to stop than a runaway train. “How long did it take me to turn your life upside down? Twenty, thirty minutes, tops? And why?” He shrugs. “Because you'd waited your whole life for someone to put that offer on the table. For someone to point his finger at you and say: Yes, you. It’s you. It has to be you.”

“And plying me with liquor?” Phillip asks after a bitter beat. “Was that calculated?”

“Of course it was.” Barnum shrugs again, but the nonchalance is strained. “The first time I saw you, you had champagne in your hand. The second time, vodka. Two is a good guess, but three is a pattern. When I offered to buy you a drink and you didn’t even ask uptown or downtown, I knew I could buy and sell you.”

“Stop.” Phillip drives a hand through his wilting coif. “I hate it when you talk that way.”

“What do you want from me, kid?” Barnum’s gaze is pained. “I needed your clout and you needed my show. It was a long time ago.”

“And the ends justify the means?”

“Not always,” Barnum concedes. “But Machiavelli never intended it to be an absolute license.”

“You’ve read Machiavelli,” Phillip sighs. “Of course you have.”

“And generally deplore him.” Barnum stares at the errant knight. “But I think people who condemn him wholesale have never been trapped in a hard place with a rock barreling their way. Truth is, if I hadn’t learned the art of weaseling as a kid, I would have been crushed long ago.”

“And you think I’m drawn to this quality in people?”

Barnum gazes at him, and his eyes are troubled. “I think you have more of it yourself than you like to admit," he says quietly.

Before Phillip can rebut, Thorne saunters over, his handsome face aglow with the raconteur’s success. “Sadly, Carton, I’ll have to excuse myself,” he says, lighting an Old Judge cigarette. “Mater’s caught wind of my return, and if I don’t make an appearance, she’s liable to repossess my family jewels.”

“You come home for the first time in twenty years and you haven’t seen your parents?” Barnum asks as their mustachioed bartender deals a fresh round of drinks with an adroitness only matched by Barnum himself.

“Not to be indelicate, Mr Barnum, but some of us would have been fortunate to be orphaned at twelve.” As Thorne turns away, he arches a brow. “If I may be shocking, sir, are you really turning forty-nine?”

“If I may be shocking, yes,” Barnum says wryly.

“Impossible.” Thorne drops a sly wink. “You don’t look a day over fifty.”

Barnum shakes his head, but he’s smiling. “Walk me out, Carton,” Thorne orders genially, and Phillip follows him.

“Eric, thank you.” Phillip speaks quietly as Thorne pauses at the curb, squinting up at the clear night sky. “You don’t know what this means to all of us.”

“Business, Carton, at least as regards the girl. She really is exquisite, but you’re the one I came back for.” Thorne looks at him, his eyes strangely flat in the shadows. “Samuel Winthrop exchanged words with me after you left the gala. Heated ones.”

Just like that, the hilarity carrying on inside seems a little less luminous. “Eric, you didn’t…”

“I let it pass.” Thorne’s face is sketched in grim lines. “For your sake. He was upset about his daughter’s humiliation, but unfortunately, he hasn’t the restraint of his father. If he pursues the matter, I may have to take him up on it.”

They stand there in silence while a hansom rattles past in the darkness. “Do you still carry?” Thorne asks finally.

“You know how much I hate that thing, Eric.”

“Well, it might be a good idea to kiss and make up. Roland Winthrop is too smart to try anything, but his son hasn’t his good sense. It might be nice to have something on your person that looks more dangerous than you do.”

“I’m dangerous enough,” Phillip says, and he hears the old bitterness in his voice.

“In close quarters, I’d rather duel the devil.” Thorne expels a smoky breath. “Problem is, your reach always falls short.”

After a moment, he tosses his half-smoked cigarette on the ground. It glows like a disembodied eye. “I’ll be at the Postilion tomorrow until noon,” he says, settling his silk hat on his head. “Bring Barnum around and we’ll talk business. If he likes the terms, I’ll have a letter off to Petipa by the end of the week.”

“We’ll be there.” Phillip watches his friend climb into his carriage and settle back against the cushions. “Thanks again, Eric.”

With a jaunty wave, Thorne nods at the footman, who shuts him in. As the carriage rolls smoothly into the sea of darkness, Phillip turns to go inside and sees Caroline watching from the doorway.

“Quite the night.” He smiles, pocketing his hands. “You know you deserve this, right?”

She dimples, leaning back against the door post. “Thank you, Flip,” she says quietly. “It’s everything I ever wanted.”

He makes a show of shrugging that off. “Can I ask you a question?” she asks, darting a curious glance in the direction of the carriage.

“Of course. Help yourself to a second.”

She rolls her eyes fondly. “Why does Mr Thorne call you Carton?” she asks, and Phillip’s heart takes a sharp dip.

“That’s a long and not very interesting story.” He eyes her, noting the way her eyes keep wandering toward that disappeared carriage. “I used to have one just like that,” he adds, and she jumps a little as if goosed. “Then my father disowned me. Now I have elephants.”

She smiles back, but there’s something hesitant in it, almost guilty. “Listen, Caroline, the next few months could be…intense,” he says quietly as Charity ushers a complaining Helen toward the door. “After all, this is a business arrangement. It won’t be all dashing rescues and glittering balls.”

Caroline looks back in the direction of the carriage. “I know that,” she says.

“Good.” He clears his throat and she jumps again, glancing back at him with that odd species of guilt. “Mr Thorne has assured me that he has nothing but honourable intentions toward you. Which makes sense given that a blow to your reputation is a blow to his finances. And there’s nothing Eric Thorne loves more than winning whatever game he plays.” He leans into the word. “Nothing, Caroline.”

She looks away. He hesitates to go on, but as brutal as it is, this needs saying. “Remember what happened with your father and Jenny Lind,” he says, hardening his voice against her flinch. “Even the appearance of impropriety was enough to ruin them, and neither of them has fully recovered. And there are other ways a young woman can get hurt that men don’t understand.”

“You do,” she murmurs.

“That’s because I’ve had experiences most men haven’t.” He resists the urge to hunch his shoulders. “Still, I am a man, and that gives me certain societal advantages. So keep a level head, and remember: Eric Thorne is old enough to be your father. He's into women, not girls, and that's only right."

Her sigh is barely audible over the breeze. “All the same, if you ever felt uncomfortable for some reason or overwhelmed by the pressure or just needed to confide in someone,” Phillip continues in a softer tone, “and you were worried your parents…your father…might…”

“Overreact,” she supplies.

“Le mot juste,” he agrees wryly. “Anyway, I hope you know you could come to me, and I'd do my best to fix it.” He tries to hook her glance. “You know you can, right?”

She nods. “You promise?” he pushes.

She nods again. “Then put ‘er there, Barnum,” he says, thrusting out his hand, and after a moment she takes it. He jiggles her arm the way he used to when she was a little girl, and she breaks out in giggles, dispelling her strange mood. “Just remember,” he says gravely, hearing PT Barnum’s old adage even before it leaves his lips, “after you shake hands with a showman…”

“Always count your fingers,” they finish together, and laugh.

“It’s getting late.” Charity smiles tiredly at Phillip as she and Helen emerge from the bar. “We’re going to head home.”

“All right.” Phillip motions for his driver to pull the carriage up. “Take mine. PT can drop me off later.”

“Thank you, Phillip.” Charity ushers her brood into the carriage as Phillip opens the door. She gives him a sweet smile his own mother never thought to bestow on her sons. “For everything.”

He tips his head gravely as he hands her in. “Oh!” Caroline exclaims, leaning out the window. “I forgot to tell Dad I love him. It’s his birthday…well, almost,” she amends. "I have to tell him."

One glance at Charity in that faded wash of light shows Phillip how drained she is. If Caroline goes back in there, she’ll be a quarter hour at least before she comes out. “I’ll tell him,” he says in a tone that brooks no protest. PT Barnum is notoriously overworked, but his wife hasn’t exactly been floating on a raft of roses all these years. “Provided my lips don’t have to touch any part of his person.”

Laughing—when did her girlish giggle become a throaty trill?—Caroline drops back against the seat. “Goodnight, Phillip!” Helen yells as the carriage rocks forward. She shoots him an impish grin frighteningly reminiscent of Charles Stratton. “Don’t worry, you’re still better-looking than Eric Thorne.”

Chuckling, he watches them rattle away toward Gramercy Park, then heads back inside to get sucked back into the maelstrom of gaiety. It’s not until he collapses in his Greenwich Village apartment close to dawn, exhausted but sober, that he’ll realize he entirely forgot to deliver Caroline’s message.

Close to dawn, after the circus has finally gone to bed and the only light on the docks is the one to the east, Anne Wheeler finds the courage to knock on the office door.

A morning-husky voice calls her in. She slips inside the familiar sanctum, knowing what she’ll find, and sure enough, there’s PT Barnum, alone at his desk amid the helter-skelter of papers, always the first to rise and the last to sleep, more a victim than a beneficiary of his gold-spinning mind.

“Happy early birthday, B,” she says softly, and he looks up with a smile, and just like that he drops twenty years from his face. She suspects he only went home long enough to fool around with his wife and change his clothes, too wired to do anything except keep the poor woman awake. He’s wearing his spectacles, she notes; he already used them when she first came to the circus, though sparingly and only in dim light.

“Don’t rush me, I’m still a week away.” He tosses his spectacles on the desk and rises, his smile warming. “And may I say, it’s about damn time, young lady.”

“I brought this.” Unable to hold his gaze, she extends the envelope with the IOU and several bills in a large denomination tucked inside. “For your records.”

“I don’t want it.” Barnum waves it off. “Put it away.”

“I’m going to pay it back.”

“No you’re not. I told you that.”

"I can't owe you this, B," she says helplessly.

“Sure you can. Phillip may not believe it, but I actually do look at the books from time to time, and I have a pretty good idea how profitable you were.” Barnum waves it off again. “Put it away. I wouldn’t take it if you’d never made me a penny.”

He means it, that’s the worst part. “Sit,” he orders, nodding at the chair in front of his desk, and she complies, feeling strangely shy. He hooks over a second chair with his foot and drops into it with a thump, stretching out his endless legs with his hands folded over his stomach. He regards her for several seconds as if reading up on the history in her face. “You back for good?” he finally asks.

“I don’t know,” she says truthfully.

“You should probably find out.” He looks her full in the face—kindly, but giving no quarter. “You broke his heart, Anne.”

“He broke mine.”

Barnum inclines his head. “Fair enough,” he says.

“Tell me the truth, B. Is he still drinking?”

“Not since the night you changed your name to Cutch.”

“Was it bad?” she asks, dreading the answer.

He scrubs a hand over his face and up through his hair, scattering the threads of silver at the temples. “I believe I uttered the words, Breathe, Phillip, goddamn you, breathe,” he states flatly. “And he did, after hacking up about four pints of vomit.”

She shudders, cupping her elbows with her hands. “If it’s any comfort, he hasn’t touched a bottle since,” Barnum says, dropping his hand to the arm of the chair. “Unless he’s done a very good job of hiding it, and he never was any good.”

“I couldn’t marry him.”

“I know.”

“I love him—I always will—but he scared me.”

“Scared you?” Barnum’s tone is calm, but his face tightens a little. “How so?”

“Nothing like that.” Sometimes they raised their voices, but that was more her than him, and he always fled in the flaming pillar of his own wrath before it could touch her. “It’s hard to explain.”

Barnum considers this. “Can you explain what happened with Billy Cutch?” he asks.

Nothing. Nothing happened, or nothing big, or nothing surprising, no great milestone to mark the fatal detour. It had been that way with Phillip, too—no massive heart attack, just a slow deterioration of the vital organ. No substantive difference between one heartbeat and the next, except that one day she looked up because she heard something different and realized it was silence. The next beat had just never come; the organ had quietly decided all on its own to call it quits.

“Billy cheated on me.” Anne shrugs, but it feels like trying to lift a barbell with her shoulders. “The way he’d read the morning paper. He said something once about my poor birthing hips, but who knows.”

“Birthing hips,” Barnum scoffs. “Yeah. You could have the Suez Canal between your legs and he’d still be looking for an alternate shipping route.”

She bursts out laughing, and just like that it’s a little better. “I can’t say I’m interested in your birthing hips,” Barnum goes on, grinning a little, “but I do want you back. I’m thinking a two-year contract to start, twenty percent raise, cozy little bonus at the end of the year…”

“Damn, son.” As he chortles, she squints at him. “What’s the bonus?”

“Phillip’s hand in marriage,” Barnum proposes wickedly.

“I’m holding out for Dog Boy Walter,” she fires back, and he tips his head back with one of those belly laughs capable of filling the Colosseum.

“On the subject of money,” Barnum says when he sobers, “what happened to yours? I know you didn’t spend it on parasols.”

“He kept it.” She worries a loose thread on her skirt to avoid the baking fury in his eyes. “Compensation for room and board.”

Barnum shakes his head. “Room and board,” he mutters. “The crowds you drew, he’s lucky you didn’t charge him.”

“I didn’t want to make a big thing of it. I just wanted away.”

“Annie-girl, why didn’t you at least let me come get you?”

The telegram that arrived with the train fare was simple: If you need me, tell me where to go. She sent no reply, but when she got to the stop in Columbia, he’d left three times the initial amount in charge, waiting for her should she get beyond Billy Cutch’s reach. No message with it, not in words, just the unspoken permission not to come home and face the music.

“I wasn’t in danger.” WD wouldn’t have accepted that, and that’s why she telegrammed Barnum. “He wanted me gone, I wanted to go. Easy as pie.”

“Cow pies, maybe.”

She laughs again, mostly because he’s just good at getting that out of people. “Anne, I know this is hard,” Barnum says, gazing at her with troubled eyes, “but could you say something to him? He’s been a real man about this. You’re not obligated to reward him for good behaviour, but could you just say a kind word to him? Just to let him know bygones are bygones?”

This is the reason she came back. Barnum is a bit of a huckster and more than a bit of a conman, but under all that she thinks he’s really just a lonely man who built himself a giant, pinstriped orphanage and adopted the world’s ugliest children. “I want to,” she says. “But you don’t know how bad it’s been.”

“I think I have a pretty good idea.”

She knows that’s true, that he’s also suffered the humiliation of Phillip’s humiliations, that his suffering has at times been exquisite, and that he’s seen lows even she hasn’t glimpsed. And yet she’s suffered in a way Barnum can never understand, a way that has to do with expectations—that while it may pain a father to have to clean up after his son, it’s at least built into the relational concept. But what part of any of this belongs to romance? Why should she be repelled by her lover when she’s meant to be wooed by him?

“It’s like I don’t know him when he drinks.” She speaks to her clenched fists. “And the worst part is, I don’t just hate what it does to him. I hate him.”

“But it’s not him, Anne.”

“I know it’s not!” Her voice rises. “That’s what scares me. Who is it?”

Silence muffles them like a shroud. And suddenly she recalls the first time she knew she wouldn’t marry Phillip Carlyle. It was about six months after the opening of the new circus, and he was sprinting to do some urgent thing—everything seemed urgent in those days—and he slid right into a steaming pile of Jumbo’s excrement. He went down on his back, got beshitted from heel to crown, got it in his hair and everything, and then he kept slipping and falling back into it every time he tried to get up. Lettie was shrieking with laughter and WD was heckling and Charles wanted to start a turd fight, and Barnum—Barnum came storming out of the prop room like a bipedal hurricane thinking someone had broken a leg or lost a hand to Zeus and there was Phillip, yelping like a kicked puppy and making little shit-angels on the ground.

He yelled for Barnum to help him up, but Barnum was too busy enjoying the show, so Phillip flailed over onto his hands and knees. And then he slipped and went down again, but this time on his face, and Barnum went into one of those fits they all compete to provoke in him, the ones where his legs give out and he howls like a tortured hyena and it’s suddenly easy to see where all the joy comes from.

It also makes him totally useless for about half an hour. So she took Phillip out behind the equipment shed and hosed him down. He was yelping again because he’s ticklish and she was giggling because she knew exactly where to get him, but her giggles were nervous because he was naked and she’d never seen so much of him before—or of any man. More than he could cover with his hands.

And then, willing away the flush in her cheeks, she threw a bar of soap at him and made him scrub until he glowed pink under the sun. When he was done, she hit him with the water again until it ran off him in rivulets and the grass sparkled with sunlit stars and the last of the gunk washed away toward the Harbor.

And then she looked at him, standing glistening and burnished by the sun, a man still young but fully mature, roped with the firm muscle of hard work, and his eyes were innocent blue forget-me-nots framed by dripping hair. But the flush on his cheeks was far from innocent, and as she regarded him, he stiffened under her gaze until she thought the fire within her would go out and consume him. And he went to her and kissed her the way a man only kisses a woman when he wants to know her, and she kissed him the way a woman only kisses when she wants to be known, and that was the first time she ever lay with a man, behind the equipment shed on the soaked grass with soap bubbles winking at the sun and the gentle rock of him above her. And as he moved within her, he whispered in her ear, and the fullness of him burned, and oh, yes, that was good.

“Marry me,” he whispered after, sated and warm, and she whispered back, “Someday.” Because that was a promise she could keep. Someday could be any day. It could be tomorrow. It could be fifty years from tomorrow. One of them could die before she kept it and she still would not have broken it.

But she was afraid. She had tethered herself to him without knowing all the things that he was, but now he was inside her, and what if not all of him was good? What if this Phillip—this gentle man who was so afraid he would hurt her that he took her to the other extreme, who told her he was ignorant and clumsy but proved himself wrong, who threw his head back with his face to the sun and cried out like a man who is at once dying and coming back to life—what if he wasn’t the only one? What if there was another Phillip, one who promised not to hurt her but did, who said he knew what love was but didn’t, who didn’t care if she cried out either in pleasure or in pain but only listened for his own voice? What if she fell asleep with the first Phillip but woke up with the second, what if she bound herself to the man but chained herself to a monster, what if she ran to him for protection but discovered he was the very thing she feared?

And yet she had loved him. To refuse to be married was a technicality. He had found his way inside her to make his home with her and dwell with her, and now he lived with her, and she must live with all the things that he was, entwined with all the things she would be. And she cried because this seemed like a knowledge that led only to a greater mystery, awful and vast and silent, and he held her and begged her forgiveness for having taken advantage of her, and she told him the truth: he had not taken advantage of her, he had not taken anything, he had given, and she was glad.

And yet, afraid.

“It’s hard being a Black lawyer in the South.” The sound of her own voice is strange to her. “He had to look good all the time.”

“So you did, too.”

She looks at him. “He said we were lucky,” she says. “That not many Black folks had what we had.” She shrugs one shoulder. “What did we have?” she asks softly, her gaze drifting to the dawn outside the window. “A white veranda with gardenias on the trellis. A little brown boy who kept the lawn trim. A hedge in the shape of an ox.” She huffs. “I always wondered why. What’s that ox doing there in our yard, and why’s it an ox and not a horse or a lion? Just trim it a little here and there, cut off a horn or give it a mane, it could be anything. But only the things we want it to be. If we just let it grow…” Her eyes glisten. “What would it be?" she whispers. "What would it be if we just let it be?”

Tears prick Barnum’s whiskey eyes. “He wouldn’t let you be,” he murmurs.

You have two choices, Billy Cutch said to her in the silent parlour with dust motes drifting lazily in the air. Either you raise a holler and I brand you the town slut, or you do the right thing and leave quietly. Either way, I’ll have my divorce…but how much you lose is up to you.

“He’d always tell me to ask him for more.” Her own voice comes to her like a dream. “To ask him for anything and he’d give it to me. And he did. Except there was one thing I couldn’t ask him for, and it was the only thing I really wanted. So when we made love, I never…never let myself…I was afraid that if, that if I lost myself…if I called out…it would be his name…and then Billy would know. And then I’d know. And then I’d know I’d made a terrible mistake. And there’d be no fixing it.”

She breaks down as Barnum kneels and takes her in his arms. “I’m wicked,” she sobs on his shoulder. “It’s all my fault.”

“No you’re not.” His breath is warm on her neck. “You’re not wicked and it’s not your fault.”

“He could tell. He could tell I loved Phillip more than him.”

“Anne, if there’s one thing I know about you, it’s that you tried your hardest to please him.” Barnum takes her face in his hands to make her look at him. “A man like that doesn’t want you to reach perfection. He wants you to spend your life chasing it.”

“But why?” The cry is ripped from her like a noxious tumour. “B, if he loved me, why?”

“Same reason we make greyhounds chase the rabbit.” Barnum thumbs the tears away from her brown cheeks; tears make tracks down his own. “For the pleasure of watching them run.”

Chapter Text

“Question.” Sprawled on the study couch with his legs hooked over the back, Phillip presses the heels of his hands into his eyes. “If I report residuals as discretionary instead of revenue, are we more or less likely to be jailed for fraud?”

“Better question.” Barnum throws down his fountain pen and viciously scrubs his hair. “If we set the second circus on fire, do we have to finish the report?”

The visible half of Phillip’s face grimaces. “Um,” he mutters, pressing his eyes hard enough to pop them like grapes. “We could probably get away with half-assing it, but they’d never believe two accidental arsons, and bail forfeiture is a fifteen-hoop write-off.”

He truly, from the depths of his soul, loves this kid. “All right, how about this,” Barnum proposes, pulling over a fresh piece of paper as Charity slips into the study with a tray of coffee. “Forget the fire. Noah’s Ark.” He grabs a pencil and begins to sketch. “We build a giant sluice…”

“What’s this?” Charity inquires of Phillip.

“A Hail-Mary Noah’s Ark.” Having uttered this incoherent blasphemy, Phillip drops his hands from his face and looks up at her. “Does that mean anything to you?”

Charity sighs. “Phineas, not again,” she chides, prompting a horrified twitch of Phillip’s eyebrows. Which, of course, is the point. “Oh my,” she adds, dry as the Gobi, cocking an eye at the gartered legs slung over the couch back. “Now there’s a pair of calves to vex one’s parents with.”

Chuckling, Phillip reaches over his head to retrieve the remains of his cigarette from the ashtray. By this stage in the semiannual investor report—which they would have finished two weeks ago if not for the distraction called Eric Thorne—they’ve abandoned any semblance of dignity. Ties and waistcoats have been shed, collars and cuffs unbuttoned, shirtsleeves rolled to the elbows—at least, Barnum’s are. Phillip is down to his undershirt and shorts, a sure sign that they’re sprinting toward the light at the end of the tunnel with the train of insanity screaming at their heels.

Nudging aside the chessboard floundering in a paper sea, Charity sets the tray carefully on the desk. “How’s it going, love?” she croons, smoothing Barnum’s hair back from his brow. He’s beginning to silver at the temples, a progression impossible to mask in his dark curls. Sadly, he reflects for the umpteenth time that although forty may be appealing, full of hard-won maturity and silver-fox allure, fifty is…well, not so appealing.

“On the subject of women’s emancipation.” Barnum cups her waist with one broad palm, appealing to her with his best drowning-kitten eyes. “If I bring the coffee from now on, will you do the books?”

Even after twenty-five years of marriage, her smile still has the power to ruin him. “You’ll get through it, Phin,” she promises, bestowing a quick kiss on his lips. And then, with a wicked tuck of her lips, “You and Phillip’s remarkable calves.”

“Whatever happened to my remarkable calves?” he complains as Phillip sniggers around his cigarette.

“That’s what I’d like to know.” Phillip’s snigger turns to a squawk as Barnum rises from his desk. “No, uncle—uncle, PT, uncle!”

As Charity’s laughter tinkles in the background and Barnum wrestles Phillip for custody of his ankles, Helen traipses in, already gowned for bed with golden curls spilling over her shoulders. “A man just rode up,” she announces. “He’s…” She sees her father dangling his business partner by his ankles. “Dad, do I have to wait till you retire to take over?” she asks, crossing her arms. “Business meetings look like fun.”

“Yeah, well, he hasn’t started biting my ankles yet,” Barnum quips as Phillip supports himself on his hands.

“Get off me, you oaf.” Breathy laughter spills from Phillip’s lips between words. “Or I’ll bite more than your ankles.”

“Hey, I thought that was your line,” Barnum says to Charity, and Helen pantomimes vomiting as her mother giggles and throws Phillip’s trousers at her husband.

Depositing his partner on the couch, Barnum leaves him to dress and heads down the hall, buttoning his shirt back to respectability. He opens his front door to find Jack Basker, an old friend Phillip cajoled into investing, climbing the porch steps on the other side. “Mr Basker,” he says bemusedly, giving his hand a firm shake. “What can I do you for?”

“Mr Barnum.” Basker’s mild face is drawn in grim lines. “I’m sorry to disturb you at home. Is Phillip here by any chance?”

“Right here, Jack.” Phillip emerges from behind Barnum, tucking in his shirt. “Everything all right?”

“You need to go to Bellevue,” he says, and the colour washes from Phillip’s face. “Samuel Winthrop ambushed Thorne on his way home. Shots were fired.”

“Oh, God.” Phillip’s face goes white. “Tell me he’s not…”

“No, not Thorne.” Basker glances almost guiltily at Barnum. “What I mean is,” he clarifies, lowering his voice as Charity and Helen join them in the front hall, “he wasn’t the one who was shot.”

For a moment, Phillip doesn’t move. Then he snatches his hat and summer jacket from the hat rack and strides out, not bothering to put them on. “I’ll ride with you,” he says. “PT, I hate to leave you with this…”

“Go.” Barnum jerks his head at the carriage. “And Phillip?” His partner pauses. “Be careful.”

Nodding curtly, Phillip strides out the door after Basker. The familiar brisk clock clock clock clock of his low-heeled paddock boots carries him to the carriage, where the three Barnums watch him step into its darkness and out of sight.

“You’re worried about him, aren’t you?”

“Caroline,” Barnum says when his heart has settled back into its normal pattern. He shuts the front door again as quietly as he can, sealing out the night. “What are you doing up?”

“I always know when you’re awake.” She curls her fingers into the wrists of her white nightgown. In the deep shadows of the hall, she looks like a ghost. “Is Phillip all right?”

“He’s not the one in the hospital bed.” He lifts a loose lock of hair away from her cheek and tucks it behind her ear. “Go back to sleep. You need your rest.”

“So do you,” she reminds him. Her nightgown flutters like wings around her bare feet as she hugs herself. “You’re always up early but you never sleep.”

“Well, insomnia doesn’t improve with age.” As she shifts in the faint glow of the streetlights through the window, he sees the clear diamond necklace twinkling against her white gown, a rare red diamond set into its pristine heart. “You shouldn’t wear that so often,” he reproves, but he can’t repress a swell of pride. “Sticky fingers only value what they steal. Not the people they steal from.”

“I know, but it’s my first real piece of jewelry.” She palms it, smiling sheepishly. “I’m just glad it came so late. If Evangeline Winthrop had seen it…”

“Well, there are more dangerous people in the world than Evangeline Winthrop.” He touches her cheek, feeling again that strange mix of pride and helplessness. “Your mother and I always wanted to give you and Helen something special for your sixteenth birthdays. You grew up with so little, you deserve to have a taste of the finer things.”

“I grew up with you.” She steps into his arms, laying her head on his chest over his heart in her old pensive manner. “That was fine enough.”

He presses a rough palm to her smooth crown, breathing a prayer that all this will, indeed, work out. “Back to bed,” he orders after a moment in a voice that’s grown strangely hoarse, bestowing a quick kiss on her forehead. “No paperwork tonight. I promise.”

He rides alone to Bellevue through the murky streets. At the hospital, they direct him down an echoing hall to a quiet room filled with narrow, white-sheeted beds. It’s not the burn ward, thank God; it’s hard to forget the sight of a vibrant man made small by pillows and bandages.

Speak of the devil, Phillip Carlyle sits by a bed near the far wall, wearing the worn and weary look of the vigilant. Eric Thorne leans against the wall behind him, smoking an Old Judge cigarette and watching staff come and go. They don’t look at each other.

“PT.” Phillip smiles up wearily as Barnum stops at the foot of the bed. He’s neither drinking nor smoking. “You didn’t have to come.”

“You look exhausted.” Barnum studies his haggard face. “How’s it going?”

“He’s been in and out.” Phillip’s sunken eyes are painted with dark circles. “They don’t think he’ll live to see the dawn.” He glances at the black square of window. “Then again, they didn’t think he’d live to see the sunset.”

Barnum glances at Thorne. “I have nothing to do with it.” Thorne doesn’t return the look. “I wouldn’t look at the man if he were Jesus Christ and I had a wasting illness.”

As Phillip passes him a sharp glance that Thorne ignores, Barnum looks down at the old man in the bed. He’s a shipwreck of a man, haggard and broken; white hair straggles over his wrinkled brow like shredded sails and brushes his wiry brows. His veined eyelids twitch restively as he dozes; the line of his mouth, once iron-hard, wavers like a drunken man’s footsteps. Bullet or no bullet, he would not have lived many more years.

“You know this man?” he asks, noting the good clothes worn too long, the sunken places where weight once lived, unaltered for lack of resources or care.

“He’s the father of an old friend.” Phillip shifts in his chair. “I used to know the family, but…”

“Why aren’t they here?”

“Passed away.” Phillip’s brows bend together. “I’m probably the only person left on earth who would still show up for him.”

Barnum glances at Thorne again, but that yields no clues. “Look, you don’t have to be here,” Phillip says, passing a hand through his disordered hair. “It’s good of you, but…”

“I can stay for a bit.” And maybe find out why Eric Thorne put an old man in a hospital bed. “I don’t mind.”

Phillip crooks a smile back. “In that case, I’ll take my leave.” Thorne pushes himself off the wall. “Let me know when he’s dead.”

“No love lost there,” Barnum mutters as he brings over a second chair and settles in next to Phillip.

“When I say Robert Gerard is the father of an old friend, I mean he’s the father of my old friend.” Phillip doesn’t look at him. “There was no love lost between Eric and Nathaniel, either.”

“All right, but why did he shoot him?”

Phillip’s brows contract. “Apparently, Samuel Winthrop drew first,” he says quietly. “Eric’s the faster shot, but in his haste…” He shrugs helplessly. “Robert Gerard was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Or maybe Robert Gerard had just as much cause to hate Eric Thorne. The cold voice of intuition speaks from deep in his gut. Maybe Robert Gerard was wandering along Eric Thorne’s road for a reason. Maybe Thorne was supposed to be the one in a hospital bed…or was it supposed to be the morgue?

They lapse into silence amid the susurration of nurses’ shoes and the quiet passage of orderlies and the slow creep of hours. And gradually, Robert Gerard begins to stir and mutter.

“You asked for me, sir.” Phillip’s smile is remarkably bright as two clouded eyes struggle to focus. “I’m here.”

“Phillip Carlyle,” Gerard rasps, and Phillip takes his worn hand in his, pressing it gently between his palms. “My God, it’s been so long.”

“Is there anything I can do for you? Some laudanum, perhaps, or a message…?”

“No, there’s nothing.” Gerard’s voice is ragged. “No pain. No one. Nothing.”

Phillip nods. “Is he here?” Gerard resumes after a weary pause.

“He left.” Phillip’s voice is firm. “He won’t trouble you.”

Gerard’s eyelids flutter. Then he rallies himself. “You turned into a fine man,” he rasps. “Your shows…who would have thought?”

“You’ve been to our shows?” Phillip asks with a boyish smile that briefly snatches away the curtain of years.

“Many times. Cheap tickets. And I suppose…” Gerard blinks hard. “I suppose it reminded me of better things.”

For a while they sit in silence, the tick of Barnum’s pocket-watch the loudest thing in the room. “My Nate gave you some trouble, I think,” Gerard croaks at last. “I was always sorry about that.”

“He was a spirited boy.” Phillip’s smile is pained. “I never held that against him.”

“Kind,” Barnum hears Gerard whisper. “Too kind.” His eyelids flutter tellingly, but then he blinks himself back. “Tell me the truth,” he commands, his brittle voice strengthening. “Who killed my son?”

“It wasn’t Eric.” Phillip’s eyes are inexpressibly sad. “I swear.”

Gerard’s eyes glaze. “Was it you?” he asks in a bare whisper.

Phillip’s chin trembles even as he raises it. “No,” he whispers. “It was not. He shot himself, Mr Gerard, just like the papers said.”

Gerard sighs as if released from a great weight. “Then,” he says, once again feeble, “I can forgive all the rest.”

Phillip presses his hand tightly. “Was he strong?” Gerard whispers, tears standing in his dimming eyes, and a foul odour rides the wave of his breath. Barnum has smelled that odour once before, on the dying breaths of his father, and he has to bite his tongue hard to keep himself anchored.

“He did what he felt he had to do.” Tears well in Phillip’s eyes. “I’m so sorry. I tried to save him.”

“I believe you. But he broke my heart, and that never mends.” Gerard raises his other hand and extends its bony forefinger in Barnum’s direction. “Do you see this man?” he rasps, and Barnum’s skin ripples with gooseflesh. “Don’t break this man’s heart. He’s rough and unschooled, but he has a line to God’s ear. You understand?”

“Yes, sir, I think I do,” Phillip says with a strange smile.

“God looks after drunks and fools,” Gerard goes on as his hand falls back to the coverlet, and that low-tide reek intensifies. “We’re the drunks…he’s no fool…look out for him…”

He fades out. Then, in a voice both impossibly small and startlingly clear, Robert Gerard says, “He took the poor man’s lamb.” And then he’s silent. And that silence endures while the lantern flame cracks and Barnum's pocket-watch ticks and darkness deepens outside the window.

And then Phillip lays the hand down, and the clock reads two fifty-three. “No one will go to the funeral,” he says. The tears have disappeared without falling—gone back inside him. “He was alone.”

“No, he wasn’t.” Barnum sees a renewal of that glimmer in Phillip’s eyes. “And I’ll go.”

Phillip bows his head. “I don’t understand that last bit,” he says after a pause. “About the poor man’s lamb. I think it’s from the Bible, but it’s been so long…”

Barnum knows the reference, but he doesn’t know why Gerard quoted it—or why it fills him with eerie disquiet. “Never mind that,” he says, laying a hand on Phillip’s shoulder. “You did a good thing, Phillip. You were there when he needed you. That’s all anyone can ask.”

Phillip’s larynx jolts. “PT,” he says, still looking down at Robert Gerard’s lined face, “I would very much like a drink just now.”

Barnum sighs. “Ah, Phil,” he murmurs, reaching out, and Phillip turns and buries his face in his shoulder, winding his arms around his neck like a child.

Outside Bellevue, Barnum finds Thorne leaning against a wall, the sole of one polished boot propped against the dirty brick. Silently, the man offers a cigarette, and silently Barnum waves it off. The habit is as foul to him now as it was when he started on the railroad, and he only uses it these days to get inside Phillip’s head.

“Phillip’s heading over to the funeral parlour in the morning.” Barnum studies Thorne’s handsome face, only ever a shade or two away from scorn. Whatever storm has disturbed it tonight appears to have stilled, but he senses a groundswell in the fathoms. “He’s insisting on paying for everything out of his own pocket. You got a few bucks to help him out with that?”

Thorne expels a smoky breath into the humid July night. “I would rather emasculate myself with a rusty nail file,” he says.

“Well, I’m sure the police will have some questions,” Barnum says when Thorne doesn’t go on. “Some damned inconvenient ones.”

“Mr Barnum, the police have come and gone.” Thorne looks at him amusedly. “They’re not inclined to risk political suicide for the sake of a shiftless rummy.”

“That shiftless rummy was a human being.” That old bitterness burns in him, the injustice of the rich getting away with murder—sometimes literally. “Once upon a time he was a husband and father. Once upon a time he was someone’s son.”

“Yes, well.” Thorne draws deeply on his cigarette. “We’re all something to somebody, aren’t we?”

“I don’t know what tumour’s been festering between the three of you all these years,” Barnum says after a protracted silence. “But what Phillip did tonight was nothing short of sacred. Tomorrow he’s going about the business of burying a friendless man. I don’t want to hear you giving him a hard time for it.”

“I’ll chart my own course, Mr Barnum,” Thorne says coldly.

“No, you won’t.” Barnum steps into his personal space, prompting a slow rise of those chilled eyes to his. “Because it’s not your course.” He motions around them. “You’re part of something bigger now, son. That entails responsibility. Take it from someone who learned that lesson the hard way.”

“I don’t recall hiring an uneducated fabulist as my tutor,” Thorne snaps, pushing himself off the wall.

“No, the uneducated fabulist hired you.” Before Thorne can pass him, Barnum gives him a nudge with his elbow that sends him stumbling back. “In case you didn’t realize, that makes you beholden to me,” he says, noting the muted shock in Thorne’s eyes. “And that’s not just business talk. That’s a father talking about his daughter. And don’t you ever forget it.”

Shooting him a glare as lethal as a bullet, Thorne pushes past. “Who’s Nathaniel Gerard?” Barnum calls, and Thorne comes to a halt, his sleek boots settling on the pavement.

“You think I’m the dangerous one, don’t you?” Thorne’s voice is the stroke of a leather glove just before the slap. He turns. “When we were twelve, Phillip Carlyle came within an inch of severing my femoral artery.” He slaps the inside of one muscled thigh. “Deadly bit of piping. It was the only time he ever got a touché out of me. I stitched the crimson coats after that, but let’s just say he has a bit of a reputation at the salle.”

Barnum hardly needs to ask for the definition of a crimson coat. Not the kind he stitched for Phillip, that’s for damn sure. “You don’t like losing, do you?” he asks, though he knows he should let it drop. “Even if it’s at the deathbed of an old man.”

“Should I?” Thorne retorts smoothly.

“There’s such a thing as grace. You were defending yourself, fine, but he was dying, Thorne.”

“We all die, Barnum. Some of us die more beautifully than others.” Thorne flicks his cigarette. “Ridiculous people don’t suffer tragedies, they suffer comedies. When I hear a ludicrous man cry, I don’t hear the wail of a mighty warrior unjustly bereaved. I hear the squeal of a stuck pig.”

“And I suppose you find Phillip ludicrous, is that it?”

“Not at all. He wears melancholy beautifully. But if he’s going to act on it, he ought to do it soon.” Thorne blows a stream of smoke in Barnum’s direction. “Self-destruction is fetching at sixteen or even thirty-five, but anything over forty diminishes the charm. You might say it’s the law of the receding hairline.”

“That’s your friend you’re talking about,” Barnum says as Thorne snugs his hat on his head. “A good man who’s put himself out to fix more than a few problems he didn’t have to.”

Thorne pauses, looking at him from under the shadow of the brim. “Do you know how Jack Basker and Phillip Carlyle became friends?” he asks.

When Barnum frowns, Thorne continues, “In fifth-grade business management, Phillip killed Basker’s pet mouse.”

Barnum blinks. “Phillip,” he echoes, bypassing the obvious query about a pet mouse in a business management class. “Killed…”

“Not on purpose. It was on fire.”

“He set a mouse on fire?”

“No, that was Basker’s doing. Incorrigible klutz.” Thorne takes a final puff, then flicks the cigarette away. The smoke curls slowly toward the black sky. “Phillip killed it trying to put the fire out.”

Just before another day’s light starts to creep into the sky, Barnum finds himself standing in front of a sedate townhouse not far from Gramercy Park. He finds himself here now and then, though he doubts anyone else would understand why. The thorny symbiosis between the circus and the Herald is public knowledge, but even his wife and partner don’t know the full extent of it. He’s never found the right words to explain what it meant that it was James Gordon Bennett who first sat next to him on the steps of his torched dreams, commiserating over his enemy’s lost family and fortune, a strangely sympathetic herald of a storm Barnum didn’t even realize had made landfall.

He climbs the perfectly leveled steps, feeling the weight of this strange night increase with every one. He rings the doorbell—ding dong dang dong, as predictable as the blue bloods snoring under their silk sheets—and waits.

He never has to ring twice. Footsteps shuffle to the door, and then James Gordon Bennett opens it, swathed in a housecoat and squinting blearily from behind his neat spectacles. “Phineas,” he utters frostily as Barnum tries for a winning smile and fails. “Do you have the slightest idea what time it is?”

“Yes.” Barnum steps forward, hoping to beguile his way in by sheer repellent force. But Bennett doesn’t give an inch. “I need your help.”

“My office hours are posted at the Herald,” is the cold response. “If you have something other than balderdash on tap, I suggest you try me after my morning coffee.”

Barnum barely has time to thrust out a big hand to stop the closing door. “Please, James,” he says, and he doesn’t have to fake the sincerity in this particular plea. “It’s about my daughter. I…” He draws a deep breath. “I’m afraid I’ve gotten her in over her head. And I'm not sure Phillip can help with this one.”

Outwardly, Bennett remains cold, but something behind the glint of his spectacles softens. “Please don’t say the name Eric Thorne,” he sighs. “Devils are best faced in the daylight, and as you can clearly see…” He casts a pointed look at the dark horizon.

“All right, then, I’m not here about Eric Thorne.” Barnum takes off his hat, allowing a fuller view of his desperation. It’s a ploy he only uses when it’s not a ploy. “I need to find out who killed Nathaniel Gerard.”

Chapter Text

“Mr Carlyle, sir, we’re approaching the station.”

In his private berth, Phillip stirs but doesn’t wake. His body is moving toward a New York City train station but his mind is hurrying along a moon-washed wood road, a shadow under shadows, his paddock boots marking a brisk tattoo on the packed dirt. He’s terribly late—for what, he doesn’t know, but whatever it is, the appointment can’t wait.

Behind him, a limping tread pursues him. It’s the stride of an old man, he knows that much, the right leg perceptibly dragging, but he dares not turn to see its face. As he tries in vain to increase his speed above a brisk walk, the trees to his right suddenly collapse into a clearing. PT Barnum stands in the middle of it, limned in silver against the black grass, dressed to the nines in his ringmaster regalia. The air is warm with the scent of blue flag; hoofbeats thunder in the far distance. His partner is looking away at a spot in the trees, his showman’s jollity overwritten with the strain of some awful resolution. “One, two, and six-tenths,” he says as Phillip draws abreast, “easy on the bit and cut in.”

Phillip stops short. “You can’t know about that,” he says as Barnum continues to stare at the shifting trees. “I never told you.”

“You never told me about Eric Thorne.” Barnum raises his hand, and now Phillip sees that he holds a sleek revolver. “I know about him.”

He points the revolver at the sky and stills, forefinger hugging the trigger. The dream and all within it holds its collective breath, waiting for the terrible crack, the other shoe that must drop, the count of three forever suspended.

“One, two, and six-tenths,” Phillip hears himself whisper. He wills himself to stop, to wake up, to die if nothing else. “Easy on the bit and…”

“Mr Carlyle, sir!”

He jolts fully awake, sitting up so fast he nearly knocks his head on the ceiling. His hands are out to ward off a phantasmal bullet. “My apologies, sir,” the valet says from the berth doorway as Phillip stares wildly out the window at the mid-morning sun. “You asked me to wake you before the station. We’re a half-hour out, sir.”

“Right.” Phillip rubs his eyes, feeling totally spent despite his holiday in Philadelphia. He’s dreamed of the pursuing old man almost nightly since Robert Gerard’s death nearly three months ago, a natural psychological attempt at resolution, but this is the first time PT Barnum has made an appearance. He could have done without it. “Thank you.”

“Indeed, sir.” The valet is courteously noncommittal. “Would the gentleman like to freshen up? A razor and hot water, perhaps something nourishing from the dining car?”

He declines breakfast with the exception of coffee but gratefully accepts the offer of a shave. A first-class berth on holiday is one of his rare extravagances, a relic from the old days when he took for granted that someone would always be hovering at his elbow to bear his little inconveniences. For all the sleep he got on this trip, he might as well have sat up all night with his cheek jammed against a window.

Half an hour later, shaved, dressed, and properly caffeinated, he steps off the train. To his surprise—it wouldn’t have been surprising once, but times have changed—Anne Wheeler is on the platform to greet him. She’s gowned in green with a lady’s hat dipping low over the left side of her face, looking fresh and pretty and sad under the autumn sun, a picked flower holding its head high against the drain of vitality. As he looks at her, he thinks about Billy Cutch cradling his pregnant mistress in the dead hours and wishes he could hate him wholeheartedly.

“Anne.” He gently touches the brim of his hat. “I didn’t expect you here.”

“WD brought me.” She slips her slender arm through his proffered elbow. “There’s a carriage for you at the curb.”

He looks at the indicated conveyance. Then he looks to his right and sees WD Wheeler’s unmistakable brown-suited silhouette lounging against a rickety hansom. The acrobat doesn’t look at him, but his offhandedness is studied, a stance that’s proved comforting on far too many perimeter checks after dark. “Is there some reason I can’t ride back with you?” he asks, turning back to Anne.

“Yes.” She doesn’t look at him, and he seizes the opportunity to adore the curve of her lips and the subtle glow of her skin. “A man is waiting for you in that carriage. You’ll ride with him.”

“Anne,” he half-laughs, “what…”

“Give your address to the cabbie.” Anne staunchly refuses to look at him. “When you get to your apartment, pay the fare for one.”

“Is this some kind of joke?” The obvious finally occurs to him. “Did PT put you up to this?”

“Not this time.” Stopping them several yards from the carriage, Anne faces him. “Barnum doesn’t know about this,” she whispers, righting his collar with deft hands and an old lover’s familiarity. “Neither does Charity.” Before he can voice his incredulity, she implores, “Please, Phillip. Just listen to what he has to say. Really listen.”

She leans in and kisses his cheek. The gesture takes him utterly off-guard. They’ve had plenty of conversations over the past three months, but that’s been all business, mostly the finer points of easing her back into her act. There’s been nothing else. He deserves nothing else.

“Make sure no one sees you with him,” she whispers in his ear. Before he can answer, she leans back with a false smile. “Get some rest,” she adjures, smoothing his lapel with her brown palm. “We’ll see you tomorrow morning.”

At the carriage, Phillip gives his Greenwich Village address and climbs in. The curtains are drawn, the interior cool with shadows. James Gordon Bennett sits opposite him. This should come as a shock. Somehow, it doesn’t.

The veteran reporter is as trim and understated as ever with the exception of his ubiquitous spectacles. They gleam before his bulletlike eyes like the twin barrels of a polished gun, sights and cylinders in one. Both are aimed at Phillip.

“If you’re hoping to hold me for ransom,” Phillip says as the carriage rocks forward, “I should warn you: you won't get enough from my father to finance a strudel.”

“Why did you leave town?” Every journalist knows how to cut to the chase, and Bennett is no exception. “For three weeks…”

“Because it was my turn.” He can’t imagine why James Gordon Bennett cares about his travel habits, but the very idea that he does is unsettling. “Barnum takes his powder before the summer shows and I take mine in fall.”

“Well, you should have deferred your trip.”

“For your information, I offered. I didn't want to leave Barnum to juggle everything, but he insisted I go.” He has a pounding headache; he really should have had a cigarette with that coffee. “And may I ask why there appears to be a circus conspiracy afoot sans its senior ringmaster?”

For once, Bennett doesn’t rise to the bait. “Were you aware that Barnum and Thorne exchanged words the night of Robert Gerard’s death?” he asks, and the abrupt segue stops Phillip cold.

“No,” he says. “No one told me.” Barnum tells him everything. “What did they argue about?”

Instead of answering, Bennett clicks open his attaché case and pulls out a folder. “Do you know what your friend Eric Thorne has been up to?” he asks as the carriage jolts over a rut.

“The usual, I imagine,” Phillip answers faintly.

“Dear God in heaven, I hope not.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“You know damn well what I mean, Phillip Carlyle.” A muscle ticking in his jaw, Bennett slaps the folder down on Phillip’s lap. “Read it. And remember that if I thought PT Barnum could deal with this without your help, I would have brought it straight to him.”

His stomach clenching, Phillip flips open the folder. He reads the first page. Flips to the second. No better. The third. By the seventh, he’s sure of nothing more than damnation.

He throws the works on the floor of the carriage, ignoring the drift of papers covering their shoes. “Barnum asked you to do this?” he demands, the disbelief a lame cover for his rising panic. “This?”

“No, he asked me to find out who killed Nathaniel Gerard. This is where the trail led.” Ignoring Phillip’s incoherent stammer, Bennett gestures at the documents scattered all over the floor of the carriage. “Before you begin rehashing ancient history, consider that I have in my possession what is indubitably the most explosive story of my career. And I cannot tell it. Unfortunately, others will not be so scrupulous."

"But why didn't PT come to me? He always comes to me with..." Unfixable problems.

"I gather he wasn't certain whose corner you'd be inhabiting." Bennett looks at him coolly. "I'll hold off on breaking the story as long as I can, but you and I both know I’m not the only shark circling these waters. Her best chance for a sympathetic hearing is to let me tell the tale—a man who will have no trouble painting Eric Thorne as the godforsaken villain he is. And this time, I advise you to think long and hard about whether that man is worth protecting.”

In lieu of an answer, Phillip twists the handle and shoves open the door. “Is that huckster an incubator for a particularly infectious species of insanity?” he hears Bennett apostrophize as he jumps out, but the rest is lost as he hits the pavement and rolls. Grunting at the impact, he’s on his feet again in a moment, ignoring the exclamations of bystanders and the scraped flesh singing through his torn trouser knee. He begins to run in the opposite direction, and he doesn’t stop until he flags down a hansom heading in the right one.

Across town, Caroline Barnum is lying under the silk sheets of a high-end hotel, unable to sleep as she normally would. Eric Thorne lies next to her, drowsing on his side with one arm tucked under his curly head, his bicep a firm mound of muscle under his ear. His sharply handsome face, usually so animated, is pleasantly slack.

As he stirs and shifts his free arm over her bare waist, she trails her finger down his broad chest and over his long, taut abdomen. He’s neither darkly furred like her father nor smooth and pale like Phillip, a contrast that shocked her when Phillip first swam with them on holiday four years ago. No, Eric Thorne is tanned and finely haired over his pectorals and down the line of his stomach, leading to the coarse thicket below his waistband where lives the forbidden object that has given her so much pleasure and dealt her so much hurt. It slumbers now, but she knows she could wake it in a moment if her hand quested further south.

“I have to go,” he whispers into her hair, and she closes her eyes, laying that hand to rest on his sculpted hip. “Will you be all right?”

You tell me. “I’ll be fine,” she whispers back, mouthing the words against his collarbone. She considers telling him the truth, but something indefinable stops her. “I love you.”

“Darling,” he murmurs, kissing her temple, and for the first time it occurs to her that it’s not really a reciprocation. He kisses her again, this time on her lips, then rises to finish dressing.

“When you’re ready, Geoffrey will hail you a carriage.” He pauses on the threshold to the sitting room, looking down at the heart-shaped diamond necklace laid carefully on the vanity. His expression is unreadable. Then he looks at her, and he’s smiling again. “I’ll see you tonight?”

She nods, offering him the best smile she still has to give. He goes out to the sitting room, and his side of the bed slowly cools as she listens to the silence.

Three months. Three months since he first appeared under her window and cajoled her, all strangely manic smiles and secret charm, to join him on a whirlwind tryst by moonlight. And then there was a clearing in an abandoned field, moon-washed and fragrant, and they danced under a canopy of stars while the breeze whispered sweet nothings in the ears of the trees. She remembers looking over Eric Thorne’s shoulder as it bunched and flexed over her, charting the constellations between breaths, thinking about Anne Wheeler telling her once that some loves are written in the stars but some of those stars are already dead. She remembers thinking how foolish that was, that no light that burned so bright could be dead, and that she’d gladly spend all her pain and all her blood to have that light shine on her just one more time.

And it did. Except one more time was many more times, but there was no more pain. And, after a while, no more blood.

Finally, she gets up. She dresses and pins up her hair, clasping the precious gift around her neck, then pins on her hat. Geoffrey hails her a carriage as he always does, and after two or three blocks she’s perfectly respectable again, just a well-dressed young lady who would never consider doing anything as scandalous as skipping school for a mid-morning fling.

She alights at the Postilion. It’s exactly the sort of posh gentleman’s club her father always dreamed of getting into, though his hopes take a somewhat different shape these days. Phillip, of course, still has a membership; he and her father mostly use the place to woo potential investors. Carlyle Jr draws nearly as many frowns as PT Barnum, but he’s supposed to be back from his holidays today and he usually puts in an appearance at some point.

She heads to Phillip’s favourite reading room, her fashionably narrow shoes whispering over the carpet. She’s never felt comfortable here even on minor incursions, but she can’t go to her house or the circus when she’s supposed to be at school, and it won’t do to show up alone at a single man’s apartment. The irony isn’t lost on her. If Phillip isn't here, she's not sure what she'll do.

But he is. And somehow she knew he would be, as if ley lines have been drawn across their worlds to guide them to the same place. His hat is abandoned on the carpet and one trouser knee is in tatters, and he has Jack Basker backed into a corner where the smattering of patrons can’t overhear. Basker is larger in both height and girth—that girth has begun a subtle southward shift—but he’s as mild as a late spring, and Phillip’s eyes are currently ablaze with blue fire so fierce she almost turns around and leaves.

“He’s always here this time of day.” Phillip’s free hand braces Basker’s substantial chest. “Always. Where is he?”

“I swear, Carlyle, if I knew…” Jack Basker catches sight of her and pales. “Phillip,” he utters, nodding over his shoulder, and Phillip whirls, the dreadful knowledge writ large in his face.

“Caroline.” He strides over to her—how fast those paddock boots go when they have cause—and grabs her shoulders. “Are you…”

“Can we go for a walk?” She’s amazed at how steady her voice is when her heart trembles like a willow in an earthquake. “Just the two of us?”

He studies her face for a moment, then glances over his shoulder. “Not a word about this, Jack,” he says in a tone even her father wouldn’t cross, and Basker nods grimly, and will this be her life from now on?

It should be pleasant to stroll with Phillip along the Hudson under a warm autumn sun, the air just beginning to crisp at the edges, the rich smell of dying foliage tempting their nostrils. As long as they don’t meet anybody they know, they look perfectly handsome, perfectly respectable—just another gentleman escorting a well-dressed young lady on his arm, perhaps his sister or his niece or the daughter of a good friend or even his young wife, but not too young to be assumed a slut. No scandals. No jeers. No one paying any attention whatsoever, unless it’s to notice the Adonis-like quality of his face or the pleasing dimensions of her figure.

This is what it should have been. This is what it will never be again if he can’t help her.

He says nothing and neither does she until they emerge at the balustraded edge of a piazza overlooking the Harbor. “Caroline,” he says, detaching their arms as ships pass lazily below on their glittering pavestones, “there’s something I want to…”

“I’m pregnant, Phillip,” she interrupts, and he puts his face in his hands, and the loudest sound in their world is the laugh of a small child hopscotching ahead of its mother.

“Are you sure?” he asks in a muffled voice.

She was going to cavil—pretty sure, I think so, I hope I’m wrong—but what’s the point? “Yes,” she murmurs. “I’ve missed my last three…you know…and I’m starting to feel sick in the mornings. And I’ve gained some weight—not a lot, just three or four pounds, but enough to…to…”

He drops his hands and looks out East across the Harbor like a man lost in a dream. And suddenly she has a vision from the outer lands of nowhere: Phillip climbing up onto the railing and then stepping off, as calmly as a man stepping off his front porch, and falling like a stone toward the water. And she—she watching him go with that same blank calm, because this was written in the heavens by the dead light of stars and she can’t fly high enough to extinguish them.

Finally he asks, “Have you told Eric?”

How odd that he knew. “Yes,” she says faintly. “He gave me some money to…you know.”

Phillip’s cheeks go white. “Caroline,” he says, gripping her arm, “you didn’t go down there by yourself.”

She got as far as the front door. She double-checked the slip of paper Eric gave her with the address, but it was unnecessary; she knew just by the look of the place what it was for. A girl her age lounged in the doorway, picking her teeth, haggard and old under the fresh sun. She looked her up and down, taking in her pert breasts and lean belly, and exposed yellowing teeth. “Come on in, honey, you look like you got a talent,” she drawled. And when Caroline’s hand instinctively went to her belly, the girl laughed. “Don’t worry about the baby,” she said, her cynicism thinly capping a well of despair. “We can get rid of that right quick. And if you’re pretty, men’ll do you anyhow.”

She fled. Partly because she was afraid of whatever they were going to do and partly because she was already halfway in love with the tiny entity they were going to do it to, but also because she was suddenly sure that, if she went in there alone, she would never walk these streets again. Not as anything resembling Caroline Barnum.

“He sent you there alone.” Phillip’s chest heaves, the ponderous rise and fall of waves swelling to a tsunami, and the blue fire in his eyes burns behind a sheen of ice. “Knocked you up and then sent you there alone, he a man of thirty-five and you a girl of sixteen.”

“Phillip…”

“To a brothel.” He turns to her, but he’s not seeing her; in his eyes is the death of the man who caressed her in the dead of night and painted her future with bold strokes. “He—a grown man—sent you—alone…”

She falls to her knees, heedless of the bruising stones, heedless of the startled passersby as she throws her arms around his waist. “No, Phillip,” she begs as his hands knot tight at his sides and his belly heaves under her chin. “Please, don’t hurt him.”

He pushes her away. His hands wield a brutal strength she never suspected, and she cries out. “No,” she persists, grabbing him again. “Please don’t kill him, Phillip. You don’t have the right!” She tightens her grip as he pulls away, clinging not for her dear life but for Eric Thorne’s. “Please, Flip,” she cries, “I love him!”

He looks down at her, and for a moment he doesn’t seem to know her, and she doesn’t know him. And she thinks, Is this what Anne saw by the dead light of stars? And then his face clears and it’s same old Phillip she’s always known, sweet and wickedly clever with boundless pity for every hurt but his own. “Oh God,” he utters, collapsing against the railing, and she buries her face in his belly. “Oh, God…”

“You told me that if I was ever in trouble, you’d do all you could to help me.” She kisses his breastbone, a prayer for clemency. “Please, Flip,” she implores. “Help me fix this.”

“I don’t know if I can.” He takes her face in his hands—gently, gently—and raises it, gazing down with tears in his eyes. “This…Caroline, this…”

In that moment, she almost begs him to marry her. She’s not in love with him, though she’s had a ferocious crush on him for the past two years (she knows the difference now), but she’s terrified and hurt and desperate and pregnant. She wants to feel protected. She wants to feel secure. She wants to feel loved. With Phillip, she’s always felt those things. Torn between what she wants and what she needs, what will she choose when every option has its own little corner in hell?

Suddenly, her father’s life is starting to make sense.

“What do I do?” she whispers as Phillip gently raises her and seats her on a stone bench.

“You have to tell your parents.” He sits next to her. Takes her hands in his. “As soon as possible.”

“I can’t,” she says, appalled.

“Why not?”

“Because…” She thinks about the rage turning his lovely face into a hateful grotesquerie, how everything she assumed she knew about him was shattered in a moment. “Because Dad will kill you,” she finishes. “And then he’ll kill him.”

“So be it.” His face is ashen. “You can’t face this alone.”

“But you’re a man of the world. You have money…means. Can’t you just…”

“Caroline, what do you think I can do?” he asks when she trails off. “This is not a problem that’s going to get smaller with time. And if I try to keep your secret and it comes out, they’ll think I did this.” Fresh tears dampen his eyes. “Please don’t put me in that position. I’ll take any fall for you. I’ll let the world think whatever it wants to think. But I can’t live with your father thinking it.”

None of them could. She’s just grasping at straws, long after the camel’s back has already broken. “Then convince him to marry me.” She tries to sound adult, to sound like this is just another part of the plan. “Please.”

“Caroline…”

“Try.” She hears the tears in her voice before she feels them in her eyes. “He loves me, Phillip. I know he does. He just needs to know that you and Dad won’t stand between us. That everything will be all right in the end.” That we can be a family.

In his silence, she hears how unlikely that is. “I’m going to do everything I can to help you,” Phillip says at last, as noncommittal as Eric's non-reciprocation. “And I promise, no matter what happens with Eric today, I’ll be at your house tonight to help you tell your parents. But first you need to tell me everything. Everything, Caroline.”

So she does. Starting with the night Robert Gerard died.

“Carton! Just the man I wanted to see.” As Phillip stands on the threshold of Eric Thorne’s posh sitting-room in The Towns, Thorne rises to his feet—bounces, almost. He’s glowing with vitality, his summer tan just beginning to fade, good health and sexual satiety bursting from every pore, and suddenly Phillip is sick with loathing.

“Petipa sent another letter.” Thorne holds it up. “He’s confirmed the booking for London. She’ll back by the end of October, early November at the very…”

He stops. “What’s wrong?” he asks, peering into Phillip’s face. “What is it?”

“Send your man away.” Phillip barely recognizes his own voice. “Do it.”

For a moment Thorne just looks at him. Then he nods at Geoffrey, who departs with a bow. The front door shuts with a click, and suddenly they’re alone—except for the elephant in the room.

“What’s all this?” Thorne’s tone is still civil, even friendly, but it’s underwritten by a subtle warning. “It’s not every day a man excuses my servants for me.”

“Did you sleep with Caroline Barnum?”

Time seems to stop—or perhaps it’s only now resuming after its nineteen-year pause. “Is she accusing me?” Thorne asks, and a tinny hum starts up in Phillip’s ears.

“Did you or didn’t you?” he hears himself ask.

Thorne turns away. “My God,” Phillip says, feeling his skin go cold. “You did.”

“Don’t sound so shocked.” Thorne’s voice is tight as he rummages in his desk. “It’s not as if I forced her.”

“That’s not the point!”

“Oh?” Thorne turns around with a bitter smile, a pack of Old Judge in one hand. “Would you rather I bloodied her thighs by force?”

“If you had, my gun would be doing the talking, and this conversation would already be over.” For the first time, Phillip sees a hint of something in Thorne’s eyes other than cold anger, something like what he saw after the bullet passed through Nathaniel Gerard’s head. He rejoices at its appearance. “She says the first time was three months ago, the night of Robert Gerard’s death. You showed up under her window while Barnum was out. Is that true?”

“Fascinating that you place so little faith in her…”

“Is it true, Eric!”

Thorne stares at him. “As you say,” he grits out.

In the silence, Thorne strikes a match; the flame raises a brief flush in his pale face. “I wouldn’t employ PT Five-Points Barnum to unclog my drains,” he says with soft scorn. “And here he is, taking me up like a child and sending his nagging little bitch all over town prying into my private affairs. Not to be content with half-measures, he has Bennett making all sorts of awkward inquiries of my friends in Europe. Europe, Phillip! Do you expect a man to put up with that?”

“Bennett knows, Eric!” Phillip’s voice, usually subdued, rings in the stillness. “And he’s not the only one getting suspicious.”

“So we pay him off. Problem solved.”

“Good luck with that,” Phillip snaps. “Barnum was the one who hired him.”

“What difference does that make?”

“It makes a world of difference. The two of them have some weird rapport I can’t even begin to understand, but if Bennett is carrying Barnum’s water, then I guarantee he’s not doing it for money.”

“But it doesn’t make sense. You’re Barnum’s golden boy. Why would he risk uncovering a truth that might ruin you?”

“If you can even ask that question, then you don’t know the first thing about him.” Phillip’s voice rises another notch. “This is his daughter. His underage daughter. I’ll be lucky if he puts me in the hospital and not the morgue!”

“Then take your gun.” Thorne shrugs coldly. “Let’s see him win an argument with a bullet.”

“There is no world in which I could point a gun at PT Barnum and pull the trigger.”

“Not even for me?” Thorne asks with an ironic smile. “Ah, but I forgot. You’re so fond of his little slut...pardon me, your little sister.”

Phillip closes the gap between them. Thorne catches his swinging wrist and twists to slam it down on the desk. “Are we coming to blows now, Phillip?” he asks, his face twitching as he struggles to hold him at bay. Vague surprise registers in his eyes; this is not the jaded, willowy boy he remembers. “Is this what it’s come to after all these years?”

“I saw your face that night. You were furious.” Phillip feels breathless and yet invigorated; he sees every seam of Eric Thorne’s form clearly, sees the places they would tear apart. “I comforted the father of a boy you loathed and you couldn’t bear that. But what you really couldn’t bear was your own guilt.”

Thorne’s eyes blaze. “Not another word,” he breathes.

“That girl is my sister.” Phillip struggles to speak through the thickening tears. “Her father is my father. I assured him you would treat her right. I told her you would treat her right! What am I supposed to say to them now? How can I ever look him in the eye again, having introduced his daughter to the devil?”

Thorne shoves him, hard. It does little more than rock him on his heels. “You hypocritical milksop,” he utters in a low voice. “As if you haven’t shaken his hand.”

“I know I have.” Phillip’s hands curl into fists. “But I never once laid a hand on a girl who was too young for me. And I never once sent one alone to a brothel in the Bowery!”

“I gave her a chance to get rid of her problem,” Thorne snaps. “I offered her the money; her father need never know. As for her future husband, what’s a little white lie on a wedding night? Surely her mother can teach her about such things.”

Phillip swings again, and this time Thorne is too slow to catch him. His head snaps to one side, bloody spittle flying from his lips, furious and impotent shock on his face. “You will regret that,” he utters with the flatness of total fury. "I will make her regret that."

“She’s almost three months along.” Phillip’s chest heaves. “She begged me in tears for my protection. She begged me to fix it. How the hell am I supposed to fix it?”

“Why does anyone need to fix it? Why doesn’t she just get rid of it?”

“An unborn child is not a leftover scrap of food, Eric! And a woman is not a plate you scrape clean when you’re finished eating!” Phillip thrusts a finger at his chest. “You’re not the one braving the worst part of the Bowery for a procedure that might sterilize or even kill you. You’re not the one risking shame and exposure and arrest if someone sees you. You’re not the one who has to live with an empty womb or the possibility of regret down the road. And I find it astonishing that a man so intent on exerting total authority over his own existence can’t imagine that his child might want the same privilege one day. In short, you’re not suggesting any of this for her sake, or for your child’s sake. You’re suggesting it for yours.”

“I am not…”

“But you failed to reckon with one very important fact,” Phillip barrels on. “No Barnum ever knuckled under the pressure to do something they didn’t want to do. Every mistake they make, every stand they take is the result of their own convictions, right or wrong. Caroline Barnum may have allowed you to seduce her, but she did that because she wanted to, and she’s keeping her baby for the same reason. And once the Barnums close ranks, an army of incensed Romans couldn’t break their defenses.”

“Phillip.” Thorne pales. “You didn’t advise her to tell her parents.”

“Of course I did. What else is she supposed to do?”

“You have ruined that girl,” Thorne pronounces, and for a moment Phillip’s vision blanks out.

“Don’t you ever say that again.” His voice comes from far away. “It’s true, but don’t you dare make me bear your part of the guilt for you. Not again.”

Thorne’s face clenches. “Not again?” he asks softly, his lithe hands curling into fists to match Phillip’s. “Care to explain what that means?”

“You know what that means.” Phillip is breathless with rage. “But if you’ve truly lost the last of your senses, I’ll gladly explain it to you.”

They stare at one another across the waste of years. “I regret the day I first listened to your lies,” Phillip utters. “I wish to God I’d died on that bridge.”

“The feeling is mutual.” A trickle of blood dribbles down Thorne’s chin; his bottom lip is neatly cloven in two. “If a two-bit tramp means more to you than the man who gave you everything you hold dear, then maybe your father is right. Maybe your life is better cast into the river.”

His fists still clenched, Phillip turns for the door. Then he comes back. “Jack Basker has a daughter, did you know that?” he asks. “She’s five. Are you going to go after her too?”

“Stop.”

“What are you going to do to her, Eric? You can’t get her pregnant, but there are other things you could do. Will you hold her down and rape her? Will you run her over with your carriage? Will you put a bullet in her head? What do you think is likeliest to drive a man like Jack to suicide?”

“Stop!” Thorne shouts. He bows over the table, his forehead pressed to the varnished mahogany. His golden curls spill over his fingers. “For the love of God, just stop!”

“For the love of God? What god? The only god in your life is you.” Phillip flings his hands out in a showman’s parody. “Never mind what anyone else wants. Never mind what’s good for the people around you. The Lord God Almighty Eric Thorne has spoken, so get out of his way or get trampled!”

“Don’t say that.”

“Was this your plan the whole time? Did you come here to ruin her?”

“I did not!”

“Then why did you do it? Why couldn’t you have just gone after me?”

“Because it’s him, Phillip!” Snapping upright, Thorne raises his voice to a pitch that could shatter glass. “You owed me! You owed me everything! And as if that weren't true, you wanted him to stay, you let him...The way he talked to me, the way he talked down to me, as if his love for his little waif could possibly compare to mine. As if he’s not the most ridiculous creature on the planet!”

The air evacuates Phillip’s lungs in a gush. “Ridiculous?” he breathes. “You think he’s ridiculous?”

“You don’t?” Thorne throws up his hands. “Come on, Phillip, you humour him, but it’s only a lark. You can’t think that buffoon capable of real feeling.”

Phillip braces himself against the wall with one hand. “I can’t believe you think that,” he says. “It’s bad enough to say it, but to think it…”

“Well, what else am I supposed to think? He can hardly be serious for five minutes together, and as for trying to sit still…”

“He’s playing, Eric! That’s what joy looks like. And half the time he’s only doing it because other people need him to. If he didn’t have the rest of us to cheer up, I think there are days he might not even get out of bed.”

“How noble of him to make the effort.”

“It is noble. It is noble, Eric. I know you don’t think such an adjective could possibly apply to him, but you haven’t seen him in his moments of greatness.”

“I’ve seen plenty, and I wished I’d been spared.”

“I’m not talking about the shows!”

“Then what are you talking about?” Thorne throws up his hands again. “What are you talking about, Phillip?”

Too many things to count. Too many things to tell. He could talk about the night Barnum carried him from the inferno, but that’s only the tip of the iceberg, the piece everyone else sees. It goes so much deeper than that, far below the waves where it’s cold and dark and drowning people die silently. There have been nights upon nights of tear-soaked collars and vomit-strewn sheets, dry and delirious hellscapes where all he knew for sure were the hands that anchored him. There have been black highways of dehumanizing debauchery, exhausting peregrinations by dark whose dawns brought only horror and regret, where the light of day was the light of despair, where the only sanity was a familiar footfall on a strange stair. These things don’t make the papers. These things don’t take a bow. These are the efforts easy to forget but impossible to fake, the moments when no one had to show up but someone did, the rescues that line no pockets. This is nobility, this is grace, and its face is tired and worn.

Without another word, he turns for the door. There’s nothing left to say. The gulf is widening with every passing second, and soon even a shout will be lost. “I suppose you’re going to play the gentleman,” Thorne calls after him bitterly. “Tell him that when she moans, she’s every bit as loud as he is.”

If he stays, he will commit murder. So he just shuts the door behind him, not too loudly and not too softly, and walks away.

Chapter Text

The first thing Phillip Carlyle does upon reaching his apartment is find his gun.

It’s tucked away in the back of his wardrobe in a dusty, nondescript lockbox that’s gone stiff in the joints. He takes it down and sits with it on the bed, tracing the splotches of rust with the fingers of his aching right hand. He’s carted this hateful burden through his chameleonic life like an obligation willed to him by an odious dearly-departed—and considering his estrangement from his father, that’s not far from the truth.

As he stares down at the sleek revolver—one in the chamber and spin it first is his policy, what his father used to call godless man’s faith—he thinks about how he hasn’t touched it in years except to clean it. Thinks about how he didn’t smoke for months until Eric Thorne reappeared. Thinks about the third person in that unholy Carlyle trinity, God the Spirits, and how it’s never far behind God the Father and God the Gun.

He takes it out to the kitchen. On the threshold of his sitting-room, he pauses to look around. He let this apartment shortly after the first profits from the second circus, but it’s never shed its here’s-your-hat-what’s-your-hurry vibe. He’d much prefer a circus caravan, or succumbing to Barnum’s frequent hints to occupy the spacious third floor of his townhouse “for a fraction of your current rent, Phillip, you’d have to be crazy not to take it.” But shame demands respectability, and respectability demands independence, so he keeps the apartment and uses work as an excuse to spend his days and nights elsewhere. And when the excuses dry up, he works or reads in his unremarkable sitting-room until he can’t keep his eyes open, and startles awake in the wee hours gripped by the conviction that Anne Wheeler and PT Barnum and all his friends and the circus were just dreams conjured by overactive loneliness, that it’s always just been him and this neat, sparse, respectable apartment where he will die as he has lived, alone and unloved and unloving.

Go home for once without taking the circus with you, Barnum complains. But Phillip will never do that. He will never risk waking up without proof that he did not inhabit the world only to inherit the wind.

He goes into the kitchen and sees immediately that James Gordon Bennett has been here. How he got in is another mystery he’d rather not contemplate. A novelty phonograph sits on the kitchen table with a single tin foil cylinder next to it in its storage tube, a rather pointed note pinned under it: I know he showed you how to work this. Next to that is a stack of documents crowned with a familiar folder, evidence collected for Barnum and now left in Phillip’s charge. A second note peeks out of the folder: These are the only copies. Lastly, sitting by the table on the floor is Phillip’s valise, abandoned in Bennett’s carriage when he did his impromptu version of the Human Cannonball.

It would be the easiest thing in the world to pick up that valise and take off, maybe for Philadelphia, maybe for the West or South, maybe across an ocean or two. Just turn tail and run the way he always does, trying to outpace the old man, leaving those who’ve fallen in his wake to drown in it.

He sits down at the table and opens the folder. The same damning evidence stares him in the face. He closes it and puts it aside, then shifts through the other dusty relics from a past he’s tried his hardest to forget. He spends a quarter-hour poring over an old newspaper copy, never published, dated July twentieth, 1858. The front page is dominated by this screamer of a headline: WHO KILLED NATHANIEL GERARD? Under the headline is his own photograph—nineteen years younger, thinner, and wanner—on the right side of a three-picture spread. Eric Thorne’s image is on the left, Nathaniel Gerard’s in the middle. They’re all so young. The archival text lays out the strangeness of the purported suicide: the second gun that was fired, the blown-out window, the five witnesses, the only other person present with powder burns on his hands. He reads about the police report that detailed all these things, mysteriously altered several days later…and the incident exactly two weeks prior that explains why Nathaniel Gerard’s suicide was almost certainly a murder.

Under these, he finds a stack of old case notes annotated by the earnest, hasty hand of an investigative journalist not yet hardened to the world. The ink is faded and the paper yellowed, but the notes are clearly legible. Some are questions jotted down to jog a preoccupied memory—Who commits suicide in a group of people? Were they friends or spectators? If he didn’t shoot N.G., why did he shoot the window?—and some are the musings and hunches of odd hours. Most are pertinent to the case, but a few admix with the half-lunatic minutiae of a single man forever losing his errand list. Legs and kegs for T.H. bachelor is his favourite, closely followed by the baffling urgency of STARCHED BRIE. Perhaps most unsettling of all is a distracted scrawl across the top of a chimney-sweep receipt: I’ve traded all the colors for green.

None of it has ever seen the light of day. None of it is known beyond a slowly but surely tightening circle. The story was killed and left to decay in a journalist’s vault for nearly two decades while rich men got richer and bad men got badder and drunk men got drunker. And, eventually, truth-tellers became liars and the only honest man left was a peddler of fantasies.

“This is Mr James Gordon Bennett of The New York Herald, recording on the morning of July thirteenth, 1877. I make this recording using an experimental model of Mr Thomas Edison’s tin foil phonograph.” The recording is rough and scratchy but audible. “I do this for the purposes of leaving a verbal record of the investigation I am about to commence. I commence it at the behest of Mr Phineas Taylor Barnum, in hopes of illuminating the involvement of Mr Phillip Carlyle and Mr Eric Thorne in the 1858 suicide of Nathaniel Gerard.”

A pause. “I undertake this investigation for the welfare of Miss Caroline Barnum, recently acquired as a ballet protégée by Mr Thorne through the offices of Mr Carlyle, Mr Barnum’s business partner of six years. Since that acquisition, Mr Barnum has found cause to fear that Mr Thorne poses a risk to the wellbeing of his family and friends, not to mention his daughter’s prospects. On this point I agree; however, we both have reason to believe that an attempt to sever relations with Mr Thorne without sufficient leverage will almost certainly end in disaster. Hence, this investigation.”

Then Bennett’s voice again, cold and calm. “Mr Barnum, you understand why we are recording this?”

Riddled with the imperfections of the phonograph, Barnum’s voice sounds even deeper and huskier. “Yes,” he says. “You’re afraid if he retaliates, the record might be lost.”

“You understand that the task you have set me is highly sensitive, even dangerous? That should the men in question discover our activities, the consequences could be devastating?”

“Yes,” comes the husky murmur.

“And you still wish me to pursue this?”

“Yes,” Barnum’s voice repeats, heavier now but unrelenting. “I have to know who this man is and what he’s capable of.”

A pause. “And if the truth I uncover should ruin Mr Carlyle? Do you still wish me to proceed?”

There’s another pause so long that Phillip begins to think the recording has malfunctioned. And then Barnum says, sounding wearier than he’s ever heard him, “It’s my daughter, James. What am I supposed to say?”

The recording ends with a distinct click. Phillip puts his head down on his crossed arms and sits there while the shadows lengthen around him and the supper hour comes and goes. He wonders if a bullet through his head would be a worthy apology. He wonders if it would be a solution or just another problem. He wonders if Barnum would even care—or if he would prefer to do it himself.

He owes PT Barnum his life. He pledged it in the study three months ago. The only question is, will that life serve him better dead or alive?

Sitting up, he reaches for his gun. Swinging out the cylinder, he finds five chambers empty and one occupied. Spinning the cylinder with his gaze fixed on the far wall, he waits until it settles, then snaps it back in without looking. He raises the revolver to his temple and slowly exhales.

This click is also distinct but somehow deader. He lowers the gun to the table, feeling the steadiness of his pulse, feeling the heaviness of the judgement bowing his shoulders. Then he rises and gathers up the papers, taking them to the wood stove. He watches while they burn, then douses the fire and rakes the ashes. Plucking the cylinder from the phonograph, he crushes it under his paddock boot until its fragile witness is erased.

These precautions taken, he puts on a fresh pair of trousers, washes his abraded knuckles, dons his jacket, chooses his best hat, and wraps a silk scarf around his neck. Last of all, he spins the cylinder in the revolver.

It’s Charity who opens the door. He sees immediately that they know.

“You shouldn’t be here, Phillip.” Her face is white. “He’s…I’ve never seen him like this.”

“I promised Caroline I would come back.” Phillip feels sick and off-balance, but this is no fever. If only. “And I owe him this.”

“Eric Thorne is your friend, Phillip.” Charity’s voice is firm despite the tears gleaming in her eyes. “You were the one who introduced him to us. There’s no telling what Phineas will do if you show your face here tonight.”

“Someone has to show up for her.” Phillip can feel his heart hammering against his breastbone. “If I don’t look him in the eye tonight, I never will.”

“Phillip…”

“Will you lay this aside for me?” He draws the revolver from his jacket pocket and hands it to her. “I don’t want it to go off if…” He draws a steadying breath. “…if he strikes it,” he finishes.

He sees the protest forming on her lips, that feminine desire to come between two men she cares about. Moved that he should be one of those men, even now, he leans down and brushes her cheek with his lips. “Let it be,” he whispers in her ear as her breath hitches in a sob. “If this is how it ends, let it be.”

Barnum is in the front hall. He’s leaning against the wall, hands fisted in his hair, every line of him taut and stricken. Before Phillip can speak his name, he straightens, his hands dropping to his sides. They stare at each other across the space between them, never a chasm until this moment, filled with the weight of grief and a grim demand.

With a numb hand, Phillip reaches up and removes his hat, placing it on the entryway table. He follows it with his scarf, folding it carefully and placing it next to the hat. One way or the other, he won’t need them anymore tonight. “It’s true,” he says quietly, turning to face Barnum, keeping his hands by his sides, praying he won’t flinch. “I tried to hold him to account. All he would say is that she was willing.”

Barnum’s face changes. He closes the distance between them in three thunderous strides and fists the front of Phillip’s shirt, slamming him against the wall hard enough to bounce his head off the plaster and clack his teeth. He wrenches his other fist back to his shoulder, the tendons bulging like cables. Above the iron bar of his mouth, tears tremble in his eyes.

If he looks at that grief-stricken fury any longer, he’ll go mad. Forcing himself to drop his pleading hands from Barnum’s chest, he closes his eyes and angles his face, offering a clear path to his jaw. He waits for the blows that will shatter him, for the hands that stitched him to rend him, for the brutality of wounded love to break what he once dared to believe was unbreakable.

“No.” The word is a whisper. Slowly, the fist holding his shirt opens. “God help me, Phillip, I can’t do it.”

Phillip expels a gusty breath, grabbing at Barnum as the older man lists against him. “My little girl,” he weeps against his neck, and Phillip thinks with dreamy horror: He took the poor man’s lamb. “Of all the things he could have taken from me, why did it have to be my little girl?”

“I’m sorry.” It’s the only thing to say. It’s blasphemously cheap. “I’m so sorry.”

Barnum hits his knees, burying his face in Phillip’s waistcoat. His cries are awful, the plaintive keen of a man bewildered by a blow from a loving hand. And suddenly Phillip wishes with all his heart that the bullet had found its mark.

“Her future is gone.” Barnum’s groan matches the muffled weeping from Phillip’s right. “Phillip, they’ll crucify her. How can I possibly protect her from that?”

He can’t. That’s the awful truth, the blow that has brought the strongest man Phillip has ever known to his knees. Every door Barnum has slaved to open for Caroline has now slammed shut. Forget her ruined ballet career, her inevitable expulsion from school, the eligible young men who will never give her a second look. Forget, for a moment, the crushing responsibility for another life that will weigh her down until she’s as old as Phillip is now. From now on, simply walking out her front door will be an exercise in humiliation. And if she—harboured till now under her parents’ protective wings—thought she knew how cruel protesters could be, she’s about to learn differently.

He doesn’t remember how Barnum came to be holding his wife in his arms, her face buried in his shoulder. All he remembers is making his slow way up the staircase to the second floor, shadows closing in behind him as the light from the lamps flickers into darkness.

He finds Helen sitting under the window in Caroline’s room, her legs drawn up to her chest, her face blotched with tears. She says his name as he enters and he goes over, taking a knee.

“Helen, love,” he whispers, stroking the hair away from her face. “Are you all right?”

She looks up at him. The impish light has gone out of her wide eyes, perhaps forever. “Did Daddy hit you?” she asks, and she sounds more like the little girl he met all those years ago than the young lady she’s becoming.

Phillip thinks about that poised fist and the wounded fury that wanted so desperately to hate him and couldn’t. “No,” he murmurs. “He didn’t hit me.”

“Are you still friends?”

Telling that a young girl like Helen has a better grasp of how this works than a cocky man of the world. “I hope so,” Phillip says, trying on a smile for size and finding it shrunken. “For my part.”

Helen nods, wiping her nose on her tented knees. “Where’s your sister?” Phillip asks, dropping his hand.

“In there.” She points at the wardrobe across the room.

One door is slightly ajar. He knocks lightly, then crawls in among the dresses when the toe of a slipper nudges it open. He sits awkwardly in the confined space, shifting until their shoulders meet—she’s a whole inch taller than him now, and it shows in moments like this—and pulls his knees up to his chest. For a while they sit without speaking, listening to the murmur of voices from below.

“I’ve ruined their lives.” Caroline’s voice is as flat as the shapeless shadows. “They hate me now.”

“God, no, Caroline.”

“He does. I ruined all his plans. All his work. His whole life…”

“No, you didn’t. It’s your life he’s worried about.” Phillip shifts a fraction of an inch closer. “You should have waited for me, honey. I could have helped you.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Well, I would have tried.” Though she's probably right. “What did they say when you told them?”

“At first, not much.” Caroline’s voice is dull, but that’s only the numbness before the pain. “I thought he would yell, throw something, maybe put his fist through the wall. But he just sat there. And then he put his hands over his face and…” Her voice hitches. “I never heard anyone make a sound like that. I thought you only made that sound when someone died.”

And in a way, someone has. The old Caroline Barnum is long gone, an expectant mother in her place. “I never saw my father cry before,” she whispers when he says nothing. “I didn’t think anything could be that awful.”

Phillip isn’t sure how to tell her that he wishes his father had cried over him even once, that the tears are awful because they’re real, that she’s one of the lucky few with the power to bring PT Barnum to his knees. “He loves you,” he says instead, and isn’t that what he really means? “If he didn’t love you as much as he does, you couldn’t hurt him as much as you have.”

“If he really loved me, he wouldn’t hate anyone I love,” she contends, and how can he begin to explain that love isn’t always synonymous with approval, that wrath in the face of a wrong is sometimes the truest sign of devotion? How can he explain (when it took him so long to grasp himself) the difference between his own father’s indiscriminate condemnation and Barnum’s sharp intolerance for his drunken episodes, his self-imposed isolation, his nearly suicidal lack of self-respect?

“You’re sixteen, Caroline,” is what he says. “In any case, it wasn’t a teenage boy who did this. It was a man my age, a man old enough to be your father.”

“He’s not,” Caroline says, and now, finally, she starts to cry. “Don’t say that.”

“Your father was my age when you were born,” Phillip reasons softly, but implacably. “If anything, he was younger.”

Something in Caroline’s sob confirms that she’s already done the math. “It’s perfectly natural,” Phillip resumes, keeping his voice low, “for a girl your age to be attracted to an older, more experienced man. But the converse is not true. In any case, he doesn’t feel the same way about you that you do about him.”

“You don’t know that,” Caroline whispers, but he hears the doubt in her faith, and grief nips at those heels.

“Don’t I?” Despite his sorrow, Phillip allows the edge of his voice to harden. “Then where is he?” He waits just long enough to allow her to give an answer he knows she won’t. “Why am I here, risking your parents’ wrath, and your child’s father is nowhere to be found?”

“He’s probably afraid Daddy will kill him.”

“I was afraid your father would kill me. But I chose to show up.” God willing, she’ll never know how close it was. “For him, for your mother, and most of all for you. Because that’s what a real man does. He might not always do the right thing on the first go, but he accepts the consequences of his actions, and he certainly doesn’t let the vulnerable bear them for him.”

“Then maybe that’s what I should do.” The outline of Caroline’s chin shifts, trembles. “Maybe I should make things easier on everyone and just leave.”

“You think that would make things easier? You don’t think the grief of losing you would destroy your parents?”

“I think this will destroy my parents.”

“This, your parents can survive. You lighting out on your own with a baby in tow…”

“Then bring him back,” Caroline cries, turning on him. “You brought him to me, bring him back!”

“I can’t.” He’s never felt so helpless. “He won’t let me.”

“He loves me,” Caroline groans, and buries her face in his chest. “He must.”

“Your parents love you.” He speaks against the crown of her head. “Your sister loves you. I love you. Those are the true things. Hold onto those.”

“I don’t want those things.” Her lament is muffled against his shirt, hot with despair. “I want him.”

“I know, Caroline.” Phillip clutches her as her grief dampens his shirt. “I know.”

Around two in the morning, Phillip steps out to clear his head. When he gets back, he finds Barnum sitting alone on the study couch by the light of a single lamp. His abstracted gaze is fixed on the far wall, his mouth slack at the corners. His right hand is clenched around something. He doesn’t look up as Phillip slips in and pulls up an armchair, sitting with the quiet care of a mourner at a vigil.

“Charity’s with her.” Finally, Barnum breaks the silence. “I would go up, but I don’t…” He flinches. “I don’t think she wants to see me.”

They descend back into silence. “It was Bennett who found out,” Phillip finally says. “He set up a meeting at the train station. He’d discovered things about Thorne…” About me. Things I think he’s always known. “A few days ago, he found out about the trysts,” he amends. “It didn’t take long for him to track her movements to the brothel.”

Barnum palms his face, and oh God, he looks old, broken down and used up and worn out. Even in those first awful days after the Fire, when Phillip was a burnt husk in a hospital bed and the circus was a pile of ashes and Charity’s frigidity had yet to melt, Barnum didn’t look like this, as if a loving embrace has abruptly turned into a back-snapping grip.

It’s the betrayal that does it, the discovery that those closest to you won’t always take you into account. He could derive a certain vindictive satisfaction from that, could say there, now you know how it feels, how we felt, but he can’t. And he’ll never need to. Love keeps no record of wrongs, but one’s own sins are indelible.

“When she told us, it hit me like a ton of bricks.” Barnum wipes his mouth with a trembling hand that, until now, has never known weakness. “I reacted badly at first, I’ll own that. But if I did, it was only because I knew what it meant, how it would destroy her. And I expected…I just assumed she’d say she was forced. Thank God it wasn’t…wasn’t that…I would have lost my fucking mind…but at least I would have known what to do, you know? And we would have been…” In agreement, Phillip hears in that pause. On the same side of the war. “But she told me she loved him, that she wanted to marry him, and I just…”

He drops his hand, lets it dangle limply between his knees. “I tried to pull myself together,” he says. “It wasn’t the time for hysterics or blame or any of that. It wouldn’t have helped. But she was so defensive, so combative. Every time I tried to ask her something, tried to say the least little thing, she bit back at me as if I was the one who had done it to her. As if it was my fault, as if I was the unreasonable one. As if I should have been happy to hear about a man in his thirties fathering my sixteen-year-old’s…”

He breaks off. Then he opens his clenched hand to reveal the stunning red diamond necklace he and Charity gave Caroline, the one Phillip helped scour the face of the earth for because nothing less than perfect would be good enough, and sure enough, they found perfect—they found damn near priceless—but not before he and Barnum just about murdered each other.

“Oh, PT,” he murmurs, cupping Barnum’s hand in both of his like a broken bird. The pendant is undamaged, but the clasp has snapped. “What happened?”

Barnum shakes his head. “She ripped it right off her neck,” he says hoarsely. “Threw it at me. Looked me in the eye and said she hated me. Said if I was going to talk like that about the man she loved, I wasn’t her father anymore.”

“She didn’t mean that, Phin.” He thinks about Caroline saying I forgot to tell him I love him…I have to tell him. How she couldn’t leave until she was sure her father would get the message...the one he forgot to deliver. How weak that message will sound now with that broken necklace to gainsay it.

“Oh, she meant it.” Barnum’s voice is dull. “Phillip, I’ve been selfish so many times. I’ve done so many things wrong. But there have been so many things…so many things I’ve given up so she could have them…Phillip, there were times I went hungry," he cries. “I pretended it was dinner theatre and I was the entertainment just so my little girls wouldn’t wonder why their father didn’t eat with them. They never knew. I made sure they never knew. I’ve told more lies for love than I’ve ever told for money, and I would do it all again if I had to. And now she hates me? Do I deserve that? Has my love been so small that I really deserve that?”

“Of course you don’t.” Phillip kneels before him on the carpet, silently urging Barnum to look at him. “She’s hurt and frightened, but this will pass.” His lips tremble despite his efforts to control them. “I wish you’d known you could come to me. I wish I’d made sure you knew.”

“I didn’t know what to think.” Barnum’s voice is barely audible. “You and Thorne…I didn’t know how to read you. For the first time, Phillip, I—I didn’t know you.”

Phillip’s stomach twists. Anne said something like that to him once, shortly before Billy Cutch. And this time he’s not even drunk.

“I’ve barely slept a wink since that night,” Barnum goes on, and Phillip wonders how he didn’t see until now terrible his friend looks, hollow-eyed and depleted, mentally whittled down to nothing by silent smiles and veiled threats, how the crafty old fox who’s slipped a thousand nets has been reduced to gnawing his own leg in a trap. “I made sure they were never alone. I tracked her every movement. I tracked his. And sometimes he would look at me…smile at me…and I was sure he was warning me to behave. But I could take all that because I was sure he hadn’t gotten at her. And I didn’t really think he would try. Because that would ruin him, too. I thought…I thought if he would go after anyone…it would be me…or you…but not…not her…”

Phillip’s nails dig into his palms, stretching the skin over his bruised knuckles. I should have killed that bastard when I had the chance. But how could I? She loves him.

For a long time, neither of them speaks. Then Barnum says, “I’m going to see him in the morning. First thing.” He looks at Phillip with a naked trust he’s never been further from deserving. “Will you come with me, Phillip?”

“Of course.” He squeezes Barnum’s hand fiercely. “And I’ll be on your side of the table.”

Barnum offers a shaky smile. Then he bows his head, and his broad chest hitches. “God, I wish he had just shot me,” he whispers, and not for the first time Phillip wishes that human hearts were as hard to break as diamonds.

That first awful night seems endless, but as all nights do, it eventually yields to dawn.

Phillip cleans himself up in the downstairs bathroom, then takes his place at the foot of the stairs. This will be the first of many painful journeys together. He wishes he could have taken them alone.

At last Barnum’s familiar tread, slower and heavier but unmistakably his, descends the stairs. Phillip glances up reflexively, then straightens, his hat in his hands. Barnum is in his best suit this morning, but that’s not what strikes him. The lines in his tanned face have been graven more sharply than ever, not by age but by grief, and his jaw has been firmed by love rather than rage, and his shoulders have been lifted by the grim determination to bear whatever humiliation he can so his daughter won’t have to. And suddenly Phillip loves him, loves him with a melancholy ferocity he’s never known. Whatever Eric Thorne says or does or refuses to do, it will be weak and ephemeral before the ponderous weight of Barnum’s sorrow and his loss and his love.

“Can we sit for a minute?” Barnum murmurs, and Phillip wordlessly follows him to the sitting-room couch.

Finally, Barnum breaks the silence. “What am I supposed to demand?” he asks. “Money? I have money. Marriage? I wouldn’t let him near her again if I had to kill him. Her reputation? Her honour? Her heart back in one piece?” He draws a shaky breath. “All I really want are her innocence and her future, and those are long gone. So what am I supposed to demand, Phillip? What exactly is it that I’m supposed to get for her?”

It’s a question without an answer. “I’m so common,” Barnum whispers, and Phillip’s head whips up. “I never spent a day in school, and here’s a man who went to Cambridge. I don’t know what to say. I don’t know how to act. It’s the most important negotiation of my life and I’m going to make a fool of her.”

“No. I won’t let that happen.” Phillip grips his wrist. “And you are anything but common.”

For a moment, Barnum doesn’t answer. Then he twists his hand to take Phillip’s in his. “I remember the first time I shook this,” he murmurs, holding it up. “It was so soft, so smooth. Unblemished. I remember thinking, Now there’s quality.” He drops it, almost flinches from it. “Feel it now.”

“You think I’m ashamed of that? You think I’m ashamed to be more like you?”

Barnum just shakes his head. “Strength on sophistication.” Phillip leans forward, forcing Barnum to look at him. “Resolve on resources.” He holds Barnum’s gaze. “You have her back, PT, and I’ll have yours. You come up with the schemes and I’ll come up the plans to make them work, just like we always do it. If we split the devil’s hands between us, he’ll walk away with no fingers and half the toes.”

Barnum crooks a smile. Reaching between them, he lifts Phillip’s hand again, turning it to the dawn light. The knuckles are swollen and bruised where he hit Thorne, split to the bone by his teeth. “Don’t think I didn’t see this,” he whispers, giving it a gentle shake. “And don’t think I don’t know what it means when the gentlest man in the world breaks his fingers on his friend’s face.”

Phillip swallows. “Don’t think I don’t know what it means when he doesn’t,” he forces out, and a fierce squeeze tells him all he needs to hear.

At Eric Thorne’s apartment in The Towns, Geoffrey answers the door. He ushers them without comment to the sitting room where Thorne sits in his usual armchair. The trappings are fine—plush couches, a polished writing-desk of imported cedar, mahogany siding and vaulted ceilings—but though Thorne’s personal trappings are similarly fine, he looks discomposed and tense. His curls have maintained their usual airy insolence, but his shirt collar is undone, and the left side of his mouth is bruised and split.

When he sees them, he nods at the manservant, who silently departs. He motions them into chairs and they sit, Phillip perching next to Barnum on a chaise lounge. Barnum plays the brim of his silk top hat through his work-roughened fingers, elbows perched on his knees. He doesn’t look up, but the whole world seems to have adopted him as its focal point, and even the respiration of living things is hushed.

“I suppose I should…” Thorne starts after a protracted silence, but Barnum holds up one weathered hand.

“If you don’t mind, Mr Thorne, I’ll begin.” A slight flush touches Thorne’s cheeks, but he shows his palm.

Barnum lowers his hand. The brim resumes its endless slide. “These are the facts as I understand them,” he says without looking up. “My daughter is pregnant. You are the father. She consented to your seduction but not your solution, which was partially based on her conviction that you would marry her and salvage her career. You had no intention of doing so…at least, you had no intention of marrying her. Do you dispute any of that?”

“I do not,” Thorne says stiffly.

“Then there’s only one thing I need to know.” Tears glisten in Barnum’s eyes as he raises them. “Why?” he whispers.

Thorne tries to laugh, but it collapses under the gravity of Barnum’s sorrow. “Do you really not know?” he asks, his hands gripping the armrests of his chair.

“I think I do.” Barnum’s eyes implore him. “If I offended you, why not come after me?”

“Didn’t I, though?”

A fiercer glimmer comes into Barnum’s eyes. “Shame on you,” he says softly, and Thorne’s hands clench on the armrests. “Shame on you.”

“Be careful, sir.” The answer is soft. “You are not the only one with awkward months ahead of you. If she had done as I said, everything could have proceeded and no one would have been the wiser. Now, we all face the prospect of ruin.”

“Your own fault, Mr Thorne.”

“Is it? Or is it yours for provoking me?”

Barnum says nothing for a moment. Then he says, “There’s an old fable I used to read to my girls when they were little. Maybe you know it.” He shifts a little. “One day, a scorpion wanted to cross a raging river but he couldn’t swim. So he begged a ride from a passing frog. The frog was nervous, but the scorpion promised he wouldn’t sting him because, if he did, they would both drown. So the scorpion was allowed to climb on.”

Barnum pauses to draw a deep breath. “Halfway across the river,” he resumes, “the scorpion stung the frog. As the frog was dying, he looked up at the scorpion and asked, ‘Why did you do that? Now we’ll both drown.’ And the scorpion said…”

“‘Because I am a scorpion, and it is my nature to sting,’” Phillip murmurs, and he sees Barnum glance at him from the corner of his eye.

After a moment, Barnum turns back to Thorne. “What I said that night wasn’t meant as an insult to you. It was concern for my daughter. And at least I said it to your face.” His jaw clenches. “I would like to think you had enough respect for Caroline to treat her with honour, but since that’s obviously not the case, didn’t you at least have enough respect for the love of her father?”

Thorne’s eyes glint. “Respect?” he asks softly. “For you?”

“Eric.” Phillip holds his arm across Barnum. “No.”

“Stand aside.” Thorne’s eyes never leave Barnum’s. “Mr Barnum, let us be clear. I have more respect for the shit you shovel into your garden.”

“Eric, no.”

“Stand aside!” Thorne’s eyes never leave Barnum, who receives their contempt unflinchingly. “Your wife is well-bred and Caroline is charming, but you—you are a coarse, unbridled, ludicrous man whose ignorance is matched only by the volume with which he announces it.”

“Eric,” Phillip pleads, but Barnum places a restraining hand on his shoulder.

Thorne’s eyes dart to it. Their glitter sharpens. “I’ve often thought of asking Phillip if you suffered a debilitating fever as a child,” he goes on, looking back at Barnum. “That might explain your mental defects, and I might have pitied rather than despised you. But I suspect the answer is no. You are, simply, a man of inferior calibre. That has nothing to do with your class, your upbringing, or your parentage. It is you, entirely, and only you. The truth is, Mr Barnum, I can’t stand either the sight or the sound of you, and if I were inclined to marry your daughter—in and of itself a laughable prospect—your funeral would be the necessary precursor to the wedding.”

Silence falls over the room like a cloak, muffling even their breaths. “I hope you appreciate the irony,” Barnum says after a moment, “that our only consensus is that you’ll marry Caroline over my dead body.”

As Thorne blinks, Barnum leans forward. “I’ve wiped my ass with things I value more than your opinion,” he utters in a rumble that’s quailed bigger men than Eric Thorne. “You don’t respect me? Fine. I’ve scrubbed a better class of shitstain off my toilet. What matters is the damage you’ve done.”

“Ah, now we come to it.” Thorne’s lips curl. “Where shall we meet, Mr Barnum? My field or yours?”

“Neither. Tempting as it is, vengeance solves nothing.” Barnum leans back. “I have a pregnant daughter in my care and a grandchild on the way. I can’t afford to retire on the state’s dime. So I’m going to ask you the same thing I ask my daughters when they’ve done something wrong.” He waits a beat. “What do you think your punishment should be?”

Thorne’s nostrils flare. “Do you presume to mock me, Mr Barnum?” he asks.

“You presumed to bed my underage daughter. I’m simply asking what you think you should do about it.”

“Nothing. Her virginity is gone and with it her market value. Once the pregnancy becomes known, no agent or manager will touch her with a ten-foot pole. And as we’ve both made abundantly clear, marriage is out of the question.”

“True. But what are you going to do about your child?”

“What can I do?” Thorne shrugs. “If she won’t use the money I gave her to dispose of it, it’s none of my concern—and, by the way, I’ve never seen an accounting of that particular loan.”

“On that score.” Barnum reaches into his jacket and withdraws an envelope; bills are visible through the paper. “You’ll find the original amount in there, untouched, as she gave it to me last night.” He hands it over. “Count it if you like.”

Thorne barely glances at the envelope before tossing it aside. “Is there anything reasonable she’s demanded of me?” he asks.

“She wants to see you.” Barnum blows out a breath. “Personally, I don’t think that’s a good idea. But it’s what she wants, so I’ll sanction supervised visits.”

“Supervised? I am not a child, Mr Barnum.”

“No, but my daughter is.” Barnum doesn’t flinch. “And you’ve given me no reason to expect that you’ll behave more maturely than the average sixteen-year-old. If you want to speak to her, it will be under the supervision of her mother as well as either myself or Mr Carlyle. That’s all I have to say on that.”

“And doesn’t the father of your grandchild get a say?”

“No.” Barnum’s gaze is steady. “You shouldn’t have done what you did, and then you played the coward trying to cover it up, so you forfeit your privileges.”

“Coward, am I?” Thorne asks with a soft sneer.

“Yes, you are.” A muscle jumps in Barnum’s jaw. “Just because a man is a prick doesn’t mean he has balls.”

He gives him no chance to rebut. “If Caroline sneaks out to see you, well, obviously she knows how to get away with that. But if I find out you’ve facilitated it, you’ll have a bigger problem on your hands than child support.”

“I have no intention of paying child support, Mr Barnum,” Thorne says, wisely letting the threat pass. “I offered her money to take care of the problem. That’s as far as I’m willing to go.”

“The problem you refer to happens to be your child.” Barnum’s face tightens at the expression on Thorne’s. “Mr Thorne, does the fact that you’ve conceived a human life inconvenience you?”

“Deeply.”

“As it does me. But I’ve learned that the inconveniences of love are merely chances for us to show ourselves the men we ought to be.”

“Is that so?” Thorne’s eyes no longer veil their mockery. “Well, chivalry may be timeless, Mr Barnum, but the times are changing nonetheless. Still, the law always trails woefully behind. No provisions currently exist to prosecute cases like this. Any attempt to bring a suit of that nature—or to appeal to the court of public opinion—will be met with a countersuit for defamation that will leave you and your family penniless. And I’m sure you’re aware that any assaults on my person will appear highly suspicious under the circumstances.”

“As I told you, I don’t intend to seek revenge.”

“Good. Because as I’m sure you’re also aware, your daughter’s heart still belongs to me.” Thorne leans forward. “And while teenage girls may be fickle, they are rarely fickle in favour of their fathers.”

His jaw rocky, Barnum stands and hooks his hat on his head. “I’ve insulted you quite badly, Mr Barnum,” Thorne calls with a parody of his old careless attitude, eyeing him as he heads for the door. “Are you going to defend your honour after all, or shall I call you a coward?”

“In my experience, honour defends itself.” Barnum doesn’t look back. “It’s those who have none who bend over backwards to prove otherwise.”

As Phillip rises to follow his partner, Thorne jumps up and grabs his arm. “Keep that family under control,” he says lowly, and Phillip sees in his sea-green eyes how deep that parting shot struck. “Caroline Barnum has become an embarrassment to more than herself. I have my own damage control to do, and I don’t need a half-cocked troubadour and his moony-eyed darling complicating my affairs.”

“Your affairs are no longer my business.” Phillip speaks quietly; he can see Barnum watching from the door. “And I suggest you take your hand off me if you want to keep it.”

With a little smile, Thorne complies. “I’ve no doubt you destroyed whatever incriminating documents Bennett handed you yesterday,” he says quietly as Phillip moves for the door. “Just remember that you can’t destroy me—but the converse does not hold true.”

“What did he say to you?” Barnum asks as Phillip pushes past him into the hall. “Is there something I should know?”

“Yes.” Phillip jams his hat on his head. “Don't ever try to win a duel with Eric Thorne.”

Charity is waiting in the hall when Barnum gets back to the house. Phillip has gone on to the office, but he himself will take a personal day to plan the much-dreaded visit to the Halletts. “How did it go?” she asks quietly, cupping her elbows as he shuts the front door and removes his hat. His daughters—pregnant or otherwise—are nowhere to be seen.

It went fantastic. The father of our grandchild humiliated me in front of my business partner and best friend. He told me my daughter’s destruction was my fault. He threatened to retaliate should any of us attempt to pin it on him. He reminded me that this godforsaken country has no laws to prosecute something that, by all sane measures, should be considered rape. “Fine,” he says, tossing his hat on the table. He rakes a hand wearily through his hair. “I did everything I could. Nada.”

“There was never anything to get.” Charity stands on tiptoe and kisses his cheek, then lays her golden head on his shoulder. “We’ll get through this,” she whispers, but for the first time since he can remember, he hears no surety in her voice. It’s frightening to realize how much of his own has come from her, how unmoored he is without it.

Detaching himself with a brief squeeze of her shoulders, he heads for the stairs. As he reaches the top, Helen comes out of her room, her face white. “Are you all right?” she whispers, running into his arms and burying her face in his chest. “Daddy…?”

“Of course I am.” He palms her hair, so like her mother’s. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

“Because he has a gun.” She lifts her face to his. “And he likes to use it.”

“He was defending himself that time, Helen.” He’s not at all sure of that—and he wonders very much what Bennett did with the material he collected on Eric Thorne’s checkered past, or if he’ll ever see it now—but he has to be at least this sure for his daughters. “Besides, Phillip was with me.”

“Don’t let her marry Eric Thorne.” Still within the circle of his arms, Helen’s chin firms. “He won’t treat her right. There’s something wrong with that man.”

He couldn’t have put it better himself. “It’s not in the cards,” he assures her, planting a quick kiss on her head. “Is your sister in her room?”

Helen nods. Ticking his head for her to return to her own refuge, he pauses at Caroline’s door. She’s curled up on her bed in the fetal position, looking anything but pregnant, staring sightlessly at the old familiar wishing-machine on her bedside table. She’s been crying, but the tears have dried up. All that’s left is a desert.

“I spoke to him.” His own voice sounds nothing like the voice of Caroline Barnum’s adoring father. It’s rough and coarse, the voice of an intruder, an interloper intent only on destruction. “He doesn’t want to see you.” He clears his throat, trying to soften his voice. “I’m sorry. I did my best.”

“Phillip was there.” Her own voice is dry and grating, grieved to desiccation. “Why didn’t Eric listen to him?”

The emphasis cuts him to the quick on a day when he’s already been flayed to the bone. “I don’t think Mr Thorne is willing to listen to anyone,” he says more sharply than he means to. He curses himself when she flinches. “He’s not prepared to take responsibility,” he relents, too exhausted to fight. “That means we’ll have to rethink some things.” Like my longterm plan to give you a hope and a future. Funny, I never had a plan B for that, either.

“Are you going to make me leave?” Caroline asks in that same dry, dull voice like sand over stone.

“Make you leave?” Barnum stares at her. “What…this house?”

She shrugs one shoulder. “Who told you that?” he half-growls, his hands curling into fists. He hardly needs to ask. It’s the same person who insinuated to him three months ago that Phillip Carlyle was the wrong person to trust. And now he thinks about it, he recalls a certain incident with a snake where a certain someone was convinced it might be a good idea to bite into a certain bad apple. “What in God’s name would make you think I’d throw my own daughter out into the street?”

She just curls around her belly. “I love you, Caroline,” he says to that dead silence. “There’s nothing—nothing—that could change that.” He almost reaches into his pocket to offer her the broken necklace, but judging by her stiff spine and set jaw, it won't be received. “And for my part in this, I’m so sorry. I was trying to protect you. I underestimated what he most wanted.”

Still that cold silence. And as he stands there looking at the thrice-damned wishing-machine that started all of this, an even colder thought occurs to him:

Maybe she wishes he had shot me, too.

Chapter Text

“Is it true, Carlyle?” Lettie Lutz asks, and Phillip pulls up short in the office doorway. “Did that monster get his hooks into that little girl?”

Instead of answering, he shuts the door and heads for his desk. Nobody says anything; they just watch him. The office is packed wall to wall with Oddities, more than he’s ever seen in a space this small. Charles Stratton is perched on Barnum’s desk next to Lettie; WD Wheeler has his arm around Anne; Deng and Mia and the Albino Twins are next to them. The Strongman and Constantine and the Lord of Leeds huddle together, and the Irish Giant looms above the Siamese Twins, and he sees two dozen other faces he’s come to know and love over the past half decade. And looking around, he realizes something odd: they all predate him. Everyone gathered here knew Barnum in the early days. And suddenly he shivers, the way he did as a boy passing among the ancient ruins of Stonehenge.

He lays his hat and attaché on his desk. Then he looks up, squaring his shoulders. “It’s true,” he says, and a low groan passes through the crowd. “She’s three months along and he wants nothing more to do with her.”

“What can we do?” WD Wheeler’s jaw is knotted. Caroline Barnum has been WD’s darling since the first time she gazed, awestruck, into his looming face and found it soft and smiling. “Tell us. It’s done.”

“Don’t touch this one, Wilf.” This must be what a ship captain feels strolling the deck of his command with a mutiny brewing and no land in sight. “This is not the Eric Thorne I grew up with. If he’s willing to stoop this low, I can’t predict what else he’ll do.”

“Is he going back to Europe?” Lettie asks, and Charles mutters, “If he knows what’s good for him.”

“I don’t know.” Phillip rakes a hand through his hair, still mussed from his all-nighter with the Barnums. “Things are awkward for him just now. I’m not sure he’ll be eager to face Marius Petipa until he can explain why his sure thing fell through.”

“Yeah, see, that’s what I don’t get.” Charles crosses his short arms, easily in command of the room even at three-foot-nothing. “Barnum’s pissed off a lot of people. He’s been beaten up. He’s had a couple of guns waved in his face. But I never saw anybody who hated him enough to ruin their own life over it.”

“There.” WD jabs a finger at Charles. “There, the man’s got it.” He steps up to Phillip’s desk. “No one’s blaming you, man,” he says quietly, spreading his wide hands. “We know this wasn’t you. But you know Thorne better than anyone. What’s in that head of his?”

“Revenge, I gather,” Phillip says shortly, unbuttoning his jacket.

“That’s bullshit,” WD says kindly. “Grade A, Phil.”

He could try caviling, but there’s no point. WD Wheeler may have been a slave and he may earn a living swinging from a trapeze, but he also reads Descartes in his spare time and runs the entire aerial segment. There’s nothing God could put in the human brain that he hasn’t put in Wilfred Dunn Wheeler’s.

“All right.” He crosses his arms. “What’s your theory?”

“Come on, man.” WD’s smile is grim. “He didn’t want to get her in the family way. He tried to cover that up. Even seducing her—if he wanted to throw that in our faces, why not tell? What kind of revenge is it if no one knows?”

“So what do you think it was?”

“For my money?” WD shrugs. “Man threw a temper tantrum. Grabbed the nearest breakable and smashed it against the wall. Only that breakable was a girl—a pretty, willing girl with stars in her eyes. So after he got the piss and vinegar out of his system and realized he could get away with it, he thought, hey, that’s pretty good. Why not keep tapping that?”

“Stop it,” Phillip says sharply. Because I am a scorpion, and it is my nature to sting.

“But he wasn’t careful enough,” WD goes on, undeterred. “Sometimes you play the percentages, sometimes the percentages play you. For all we know, Carrie fell pregnant the very first time he lay with her. If not, it would’ve had to be pretty damn near. And when she told him, he panicked ‘cause he didn’t want to lose his big star. And he figured she’d panic too, so bad she’d probably just do whatever he told her. But only a fool thinks he can predict a Barnum.”

Truer words. “Here’s the thing, though.” WD leans over the desk, speaking just for the two of them. “I know Barnum has a way of getting under people’s skin. But the one person Eric Thorne couldn’t afford to hurt was Caroline. And he didn’t, until the night Gerard died with you holding his hand.” He lays a dark finger on Phillip’s chest. “See, I don’t think it was Barnum that pissed him off. I think it was you. Only question is, what could make anyone that mad?"

Phillip's arms tighten across his chest. “Lettie, please take over rehearsal today,” he says without breaking WD’s gaze. “I’ll be assisting the Barnums in personal matters.”

“You all right, Carlyle?” Charles asks quietly, and somehow it’s worse knowing they don’t blame him, that they don’t hate him.

“I’m fine, guys, thanks.” His arms are so tight across his chest they’re practically vibrating. “Tomorrow we’ll get back to business as usual. If you have any questions, you know where to find me.”

“Come on, Wilf,” Lettie murmurs, and after a moment WD joins the Oddities filing out, touching Anne’s shoulder as he passes. The last one out closes the door, leaving the two of them alone. “How’s she doing?” Anne asks quietly, hugging herself.

“I don’t really know.” He releases a breath he didn’t know he was holding. “She’s pretty upset. I think it’ll be a while before she shows her face here again.”

“Well, don’t let her hide it too long.” Anne gazes around the dusty office wistfully. “This is a good place for people who feel ashamed.”

It is, but even PT Barnum had to be dragged out of a bar before he realized it. “I guess you’re going to see the Halletts,” Anne adds as he turns to comb his hair in the full-length gilt mirror. “What do you think they’ll suggest?”

“Oh, probably the usual.” He whisks the comb through his thick waves. No sign of grey yet, but he’s not keen on checking too thoroughly. “The reclusive yet ubiquitous aunt. A Catholic refuge for up-and-coming Jezebels. A late-stage addition to Abraham and Sarah’s brood.”

“A quick marriage to the nearest well-to-do bachelor,” Anne murmurs, and he’s glad he can’t see her reflection.

“It’s the way things are done.” He tosses the comb on his desk and uses a lint brush on his clothes. “Hallett’s a gentleman, born and bred. He’ll expect me to make an offer.”

“Can’t imagine Barnum’ll be happy about that.”

“Can’t imagine,” he agrees, crooking an ironic smile at her. “But I suppose getting stuck with the short end of the stick is better than getting beaten with the long end.”

As he puts on his good coat and reaches for his hat, Anne asks, “Phillip, why wasn’t I ever enough for you?”

He stares at her, his hat frozen between the desk and his head. “What do you mean, never enough?” he asks. “You were always enough. More than enough.”

“No, I wasn’t.” Her eyes are strangely naked. “You’d be fine for months—even a year or more—and then you’d go back to the bottle. I never knew why. I never knew when it would happen again. I don’t think even you knew.”

“But…that wasn’t because of you.” In truth, he has no idea what it was. He always assumed that getting everything he ever wanted—friends, family, meaningful work, a father he could make proud, the love of his life—would replace the need to drink. But it didn’t. He only flew higher to fall harder. “I don’t know what it was, but it wasn’t you.”

“Then what can I do?” Anne’s voice cracks. “What can I be?”

“Nothing.” He grabs her shoulders. “Don’t play that game, Anne. This is something in me, not you.”

“I love you,” she persists. “I want to help fix this.”

“You can’t fix this with love.” He squeezes her shoulders gently to silence her protest. “The last thing you said to me that morning was, Love me more than your whiskey. But it’s not about love, Anne. It’s about who holds the key to the cage.”

“You hold it, baby."

“That’s the problem.” His smile feels like a bleeding slash across his face. “Some call it captivity versus freedom, but for me, the choice between drinking and not drinking is more like…like being locked up for the rest of my life in adjoining cells where the only door is the one between them. I can lock and unlock that door at will, and in one of those cells, there’s a bottle.”

His voice thickens. “I have to resist walking through that door. I have to say no every day—every moment—of my life. And it’s exhausting, Anne. No time served will ever be enough. I will not get out early for good behaviour. I will be in that cell until the day I die, and whoever loves me will be locked in with me.”

She’s crying, but he’s glad; it’s finally hit home. “I didn’t know,” she says. “Why didn’t you ever tell me?”

“It wouldn’t have made a difference. The only difference I could make was to your freedom. So when you threatened to leave me for good, I told you I’d hold you to it…and you took the bait.” He releases her shoulders slowly, reluctant to lose her touch. “I just didn’t think the bait would be a worm like Billy Cutch.”

She wipes her eyes with her sleeve. “I don’t know what the future holds,” he says, picking up his hat again and settling it on his head. “But I have a responsibility to hers.” He takes his autumn gloves out of his pocket and heads for the door. “That’s all that matters now.”

“I’ll always love you, Phillip,” she says as he crosses the floor. “No matter what."

“And I’ll always love you.” With an effort, he opens the door. “My greatest regret is not being worthier of it.”

In retrospect, maybe PT Barnum should have seen the disaster coming.

“Hallett, stop.” He pursues him down the front steps of the Hallett estate, ignoring the rapid click of heels behind him. “Hallett, don’t do this!”

“You.” Completely ignoring his son-in-law and the wife and daughter following in his train, Benjamin Hallett stalks down his sprawling drive toward the young man walking to meet him. “You…traitor! You Judas!”

“All right, okay.” Throwing his hands up over his head, Phillip swivels back the way he came. "I'm going."

“You come back here.” Hallett is approaching seventy and none too tall, but he strides after Phillip with the energy of a man half his age and twice his physicality. “You look me in the eye, Phillip Carlyle, after you ruin my granddaughter!”

Phillip turns slowly back, his jaw locked. “No.” Barnum catches up just as Hallett raises his hand. He grabs his wrist, halting its arc. “You are not doing this!”

“Let go of me.” Jerking his wrist free, Hallett’s eyes blaze at Phillip. “You’re protecting this?”

“This won’t solve anything!” Barnum holds him off as Charity and Hannah Hallett catch up to them. “It won’t solve anything,” he repeats lowly. “He’s not the one we’re angry at.”

“Don’t you presume to lecture me.” Hallett flings away his wife’s timorous hand as it flutters near his arm. It’s a good thing they decided not to bring the girls; last night’s debacle was bad enough. They don’t need to see their grandfather tearing a strip off their brother and cursing out their father. “You fix this. You fix this, Phillip Carlyle!”

“I can’t fix everything.” Phillip raises his typically measured voice as Barnum places a steadying hand on his chest. “I can’t fix the world, Hallett.”

“You marry that girl,” Hallett shouts over Barnum’s shoulder, and is this to be the crowning absurdity in this comedy of manners from hell? “You make this right!”

“He is not marrying my daughter,” Barnum snaps as he presses harder against Phillip’s chest. “Don’t be insane.”

He regrets that when Phillip visibly flinches. “Phil,” he tries, but his partner just shakes his head and makes his way back down the drive. “Charity,” he appeals next, throwing out his hands to encompass the whole awful mess. She looks between the three men in her life with that increasingly familiar expression of uncertainty, and suddenly he loathes himself for dragging her into the morass of his life.

“I’ll tell you one thing, young man.” Hallett raises his voice as Phillip’s brisk strides carry him away. “Your father would never have brought that churl into this family. He would have kept those he loved well away from the likes of Eric Thorne!”

With an adroitness that crosses Barnum’s eyes, Phillip executes a neat about-turn and arrows back. “You want to know something about my father?” he expels, and Charity intercepts him, wrapping her arms around him with a murmured plea. His feet stop, but his mouth keeps going. “He wanted me to marry Agnes Thorne—to become Eric Thorne’s brother-in-law.” His eyes snap blue fire as Hallett’s cheeks flush with confusion. “That’s right, the rumours were true! I didn’t want to do it, but he insisted—and guess who won that argument?”

“Yes, well,” Hallett breathes as Charity tightens her grip on Phillip, “that marriage never came about, did it? And I think we all know why.”

The colour washes out of Phillip’s face. “That’s enough, Father,” Charity cries, looking back at him with tears in her hazel eyes. “Why do you have to throw that in his face?”

“In his…!”

“I am not prepared to watch my family fall apart yet again.” Her mild eyes blaze as if some internal spark has burst into a conflagration. “This is not the time for recriminations. We came here as a courtesy so you wouldn’t have to read about this in the morning paper, but I promise you this: if you disown my daughter as you once disowned me, if you desert her in the very hour she needs you, I will never see you again, not even if you call for me on your deathbed with tears.”

“Oh, Benjamin,” Hannah Hallett cries in her thready voice, gripping his arm. “Benjamin, we can’t lose them again!”

Her husband just shakes his head, looking stunned and shaken. The rug of his life has been pulled out from under his aging feet, and for once Barnum can sympathize.

And then he turns and sees Phillip staggering back down the drive, looking like a battered soldier out of a photograph from the War of the Rebellion. “Phillip, wait!” He runs after him, grabbing his arm to turn him. “Where are you going?”

“I can’t do it, PT.” Phillip’s eyes are glazed, barely seeing him through a sheen of tears. “I just can’t.”

“No.” Barnum cups his face with both hands, urging him to look up, not to look down, because bodies always go where the eyes gaze. “Please, Phillip, I need you.” He leans into the plea, knowing that if anything will pull his friend back from this brink, it will be the needs and claims of others. “Don’t go back down this road. I need you. She needs you. Have my back, Phil, and I'll have hers." He tightens his grip. "Have my back.”

“I can’t. I just can't, I…” He backs away; his throat clicks as he swallows. “I’m so thirsty, PT.”

He turns then and runs. And Barnum has to let him go, because that’s what happens when your children outgrow you and you're too old to give chase.

Early the next morning, Barnum gets the message he’s been dreading.

On the other side of town, he pushes open the door to Wallsey’s bar. At twenty minutes to eight, the saloon is deserted. Well, except for three. Wallsey is behind the bar as always, polishing glassware with his usual sedate efficiency, preparing for the day’s custom—though hours earlier than usual. At the sound of the door, he glances up, inclining his head. Barnum inclines his in return, methodically taking off his coat and hanging up his hat, surreptitiously getting the lay of the land.

The second denizen is Phillip Carlyle. He’s bellied up to the bar, perched on his usual stool in his classic imbibing pose: boots hooked over the bottom rungs, knees canted to either side, elbows braced on the bar top, shoulders hunched. It’s the same stool he occupied the night Barnum wined and dined him—or boozed and schmoozed him, as Phillip likes to put it. Of all the things that have changed, this hasn’t, and it’s the one thing he wishes would.

The third inhabitant is James Gordon Bennett. He's sitting in a booth against the far wall, looking painfully respectable for the early hour. “Good morning, Mr Barnum,” he says as Barnum slides in with his drink, keeping one eye on Phillip. “I venture to say good.”

“I appreciate the way you’ve handled this, James.” Barnum speaks quietly, well aware of Phillip’s keen ears. “It’s good of you.”

“For what it’s worth, I’m sorry I couldn’t uncover the truth sooner.”

“You did your best.” Barnum inclines his head at Phillip. “Does he know you’re here?”

“I believe an army of angry Israelites could march around this bar blowing trumpets and he’d be none the wiser.”

Barnum shakes his head. “I’m sure you saw this morning’s paper,” Bennett says, flicking a speck of lint off his sleeve. “Feel free to vent your spleen.”

“Yeah, about that. What’s with the smear job? If Phillip’s reputation wasn’t bad before…”

“I’m rather good at it, aren’t I?” Bennett asks with a rare smile.

“Any explanation? Any at all?”

“He asked me to do it.” Bennett calmly meets his gaze. “He wrote the worst parts himself.”

“You're telling me Phillip Carlyle wrote that he has a thing for…” The quote will be forever seared into Barnum’s brain. “Savile-Row cads with Transatlantic accents and controlling interests in Kentucky distilleries?”

“Does that not sound like something Phillip Carlyle would write?”

Point for Bennett. “In case you haven’t noticed,” Barnum growls rather half-heartedly, “we’re trying to reduce the number of scandals attached to the Barnum clan.”

“It’s rather late for that.” Bennett plucks off his spectacles and begins polishing them on his handkerchief. “There is very little that can top a breaking story about New York City’s most promising prima ballerina—who also happens to be the heiress to America’s most scandalous personality—bearing the lovechild of one of Europe’s most celebrated arts connoisseurs. Throwing Phillip Carlyle into the mix was the only way either of us could think to do it.”

“A distraction,” Barnum murmurs as Phillip motions for another shot. “Dancing on the bar while she sneaks out the back.”

“It’ll buy her a little time.” Bennett shakes his head. “Not much. I estimate my more astute colleagues are only three or four days behind me. Still, for now the attention will be on the feuding men and their petty personal scandals, not the pregnant girl. Any decisions she needs to make, she should make before the news catches up.” He nods at Phillip. “You should know he did not touch a drop of liquor until our business was concluded.”

“When?” Barnum asks in a bare whisper.

“Four hours ago.” Bennett’s eyes carry a strange hint of compassion. “He came to my office yesterday directly from the Hallett estate. We worked through the night. Mr Wallen was kind enough to keep the bar open for us. When we finished, I left with the copy to ensure it would make the morning edition and Mr Carlyle took his place on that stool. The last thing he said to me was that, should things go ill, he wanted no obituary or notice. What he did want was to leave everything to Caroline and her child.” He raises his brows thoughtfully. “And he wanted to be buried in his red coat.”

Barnum rasps both hands over his face. “Mr Barnum, there are two measures of a man,” Bennett says as he pockets his handkerchief and slots his spectacles back over his nose. “How much he is loved and how much he has loved. We cannot control the former. We will be judged by the latter.” He gazes at Phillip. “Thank God for that.”

Barnum rises, leaving the rest of his drink untouched. “Do you wish to know what I found out about Nathaniel Gerard?” Bennett asks as Barnum gathers his hat.

“No.” Barnum settles his hat back on his head. “It won’t make any difference now.”

“Still, it might be nice to know.”

“No, I don’t think so.” Barnum grips his shoulder, receiving a grave nod in return. “I already know everything I need to.”

At the bar, he leans over Phillip, who's sunk low over the counter. “Come on, Phil,” he says quietly, moving the shot glass out of his reach. “I’ll take you home.”

“I didn’t kill him,” Phillip mumbles against the gleaming bar top. “I didn’t do it, PT.”

“I know.” Barnum palms his shoulders, urging him to sit up. “Let’s go home.”

“Don’t have one.” Phillip lolls against him; his breath is foul, his stubble pronounced, and soon the wrinkles in his clothes will be beyond remedy. “Did I fix it yet?” he breathes against Barnum’s neck as he slings him into his arms. “Did I fix it, Phin?”

“Give it a few more days.” His throat tight, Barnum carries him to the door, ignoring the twinge in his back. He won’t be able to do that forever. He’s not getting any younger, and Phillip’s not getting any lighter. “It’s going to be all right. I promise.”

Chapter Text

The first time Phillip Carlyle realizes he was born to fix other people’s problems, he is fifteen and newly engaged to Agnes Thorne.

“But…why?” His father’s study has never been a reassuring place, but tonight its dark opulence seems calculated to smother him. “Why, Father?”

“Because you must marry someone.” Across the desk, Theodore Carlyle’s mouth pinches. “And because she must marry someone. And because I believed you would appreciate marrying into the family of a good friend.”

“Yes, but…” Phillip shakes his head. “Why now?”

Carlyle Sr studies his younger son—standing, of course, rarely invited to sit—and then sighs. “Festus Thorne is not in good health. His heart…” He grimaces. “It makes a man think about the future.”

“Agnes,” Phillip murmurs.

“She is the very definition of eligibility.” Carlyle Sr rises and rounds his desk; his gold pocket-watch glints in his evening waistcoat. “Engaging, well-endowed, superbly connected…”

“Four months short of her tenth birthday,” Phillip mutters.

A thunderstorm gathers on Carlyle Sr’s high brow. “No one is proposing you wed and bed a nine-year-old girl,” he says. “You will propose to her on her sixteenth birthday. On her eighteenth, you will marry her.”

“And if she says no?”

“The only grounds for refusal would be some egregious fault in the bridegroom.” Carlyle Sr’s cool gaze pieces him. “And you will not provide her with such grounds.”

Phillip bites his tongue until he tastes blood. “No more carpet-cleaners’ daughters on the back porch,” Carlyle Sr says with the soft lethality of a panther. “No more coloured girls of any description—unless you want a repeat of our unpleasant episode in this study.”

“It was one little kiss.” His own screams echo in his mind to match the swish of the rattan cane. “We were twelve.”

“Was Noah Oliver just one little kiss?” Carlyle Sr’s polished shoes settle inches from Phillip’s. “It was more, wasn’t it?” he murmurs. “He did things to you. Things you should have done to a woman.”

“I was just curious.” Phillip flushes hotly. “It was one time.”

“With him, perhaps, but how many others have there been?” Carlyle Sr leans in; Phillip instinctively leans away. “How many others, Phillip?” He waits a beat, then straightens. “Rumours travel, boy. Left unchecked, those rumours will ruin you.”

Phillip looks away. “I have arranged for you to marry a sweet, pretty, rich, respectable girl,” Carlyle Sr continues after another beat. “I expect you to be grateful. I also expect that you will do nothing to sully the union. Do you understand what I mean?”

“She is nine, Father,” Phillip snaps, more appalled than angry.

“Yes, but you are not.” Carlyle Sr’s glare is hot on his head. “A boy who will commit one vice will commit another. You are not to touch her until your wedding night on her eighteenth birthday. Do you understand?”

“I would never…”

“And you are not to submit yourself to other boys,” Carlyle Sr continues. “From this night forward, if you must engage in sexual congress, do so—discreetly—with a girl who has nothing to lose. You know what I mean. But that girl must be one of your own kind. That, too, you will understand. If I discover you have engaged in such congress with any…”

“Stop,” Phillip half-sobs. “Please, just stop.”

Carlyle Sr relents. “What about Nathaniel Gerard?” Phillip asks as his father goes over to his cigar humidor. “He was going to marry Agnes. He bragged about it. It’s all arranged.”

“Not anymore.” Carlyle Sr selects a Cuban cigar. “Festus Thorne has spoken with Robert Gerard; other arrangements will be made. Mr Gerard holds no ill will toward you. He understands the nullification was not your doing.”

“Then whose was it?”

“That is none of your concern.” Carlyle Sr brushes that off with a wave of his hand. “From now on, your only concern is finding your place.”

“What if I can’t?” The words are little more than a breath. “Or what if it’s not the place you want?”

“Of course it will be.” Carlyle Sr picks up a pack of matches. “You are my son.”

“Maybe I don’t want to be your son,” he snaps, and quick as lightning Carlyle Sr’s hand cracks across his face.

As he tries to catch his breath, his father’s shoulders slump. “Why do you provoke me?” he mutters, running that hand wearily over his own face. “Why are you like this?”

“I don’t know.” The words taste as bitter as nightshade. “Why don’t you ever strike Michael?”

“Michael has learned his place. You…” Carlyle Sr raises his hand helplessly, then lets it fall. “You are always out of place.”

Silence reigns over the study. “It’s for the best,” Carlyle Sr says, looking at least a decade older as he sinks back into his leather chair. “Festus will provide for Agnes. I will provide for you. No one need fear for their future.”

His cheek still stinging, Phillip turns away. “I have only the best intentions for you, Phillip,” Carlyle Sr calls as he trudges for the door. “You’re fortunate. You stand to inherit the world.”

“You keep saying that.” Phillip opens the study door. “But every time I look inside it, there’s nothing in it.”

His running feet carry him to a crumbling jut of stone a mile or so away, a bridge the boys call the Devil’s Tongue. Its other half fell into the river long ago; what’s left is weatherworn and unsteady. He walks out right to the end where the stone is brittlest and sits, dangling his legs above the swift-flowing Trickle. Thirty feet below, the currents carry that black breadth of water straight out to the Hudson, and from there into the sea. He watches that flow and thinks about drowning, how long it would take, if it would hurt, if he would discover the urge to live once it’s too late, if he would fight the current…or if he would simply exhale and let himself sink.

“There you are.” Eric Thorne’s voice hovers on the bridge behind him, confident and faintly amused. “I figured you might be having one of your melancholic bouts.”

“I’m not in the mood, Eric.” Phillip doesn’t turn as stone-dust scatters under Thorne’s lithe footfalls. “I had a fight with my father.”

“Well, it can’t be as bad as the time he caned you over the carpet-cleaner’s daughter.” Thorne dexterously slots himself next to Phillip, swinging his legs next to his; their narrow adolescent hips jam together to avoid teetering over the nothingness. “This is rather nostalgic,” he says conversationally as the wind tosses his golden curls. “Three years later and I’m still talking you off this damn bridge.” He frowns. “Wait. Wasn’t that also over the carpet-cleaner’s daughter?”

“It was you, wasn’t it?” Phillip speaks around the lump in his throat. “You put my name in your father’s ear.”

“And it’s the first time he ever paid me any mind.” Thorne kicks lightly at Phillip’s foot. “All for his darling, of course. Well, I love her more than he ever did, and I won’t have anything less than the best for her.”

“Nathaniel can give her everything she’ll ever want. What makes me better than him?”

“For one thing, you don’t have a temper.” Thorne kicks him again, and Phillip kicks back, prompting a chuckle. “For another thing, you may be what they call a sensitive boy, but at least you know how to button your trousers all the way when you leave the house, if you take my meaning.”

“Nate’s not bad. I know he gets under your skin, but he’d make a decent husband, and your father likes him.”

“Yes, but my father adores you.” Thorne rolls his eyes. “As for my mother, she thinks an angel shat you out of its ass. You won’t have any problems with your in-laws, that’s for sure. And then there’s me.” He flashes a moonlit grin. “Your ever-devoted brother-in-law.”

“But Agnes,” Phillip persists, unable to return that grin. “I love her, but not like that.” She’s probably still young enough to think babies grow in cabbage patches. “And what if she doesn’t want to marry me?”

“Of course she’ll marry you! You’re Phillip Carlyle.” Thorne slaps his cheek lightly. “No, shut up. She’s worshiped you since the day I dragged you off this bloody bridge and home for dinner. Take last year. She was all a-tremble about this Gimper creature that nobody could convince her wasn’t real, so what does she do? She confides in Parfit Gentil Knight Phillip, and hey presto, it goes away.”

“The Gimper was just some made-up old man with a gimpy leg she thought was hiding in her wardrobe. All I did was tell her maybe he just wanted a cane and if she got him one, he’d leave her alone.”

“All you did?” Thorne cries, grabbing him by the shoulders. “You staged an entire production.” When Phillip shakes him off, he kicks him again, this time hard enough to bruise. “Starring yours truly as the infamous Gimper, because no one but Phillip Shat-by-an-Angel Carlyle could hold her hand when the old geezer came limping out of her wardrobe. And who remembered in the nick of time that the Gimper limps on his right leg instead of his left, though God alone knows why it matters? Not me! And as for that gorgeous cane you bought…where did you even find it?” He falls back dramatically on the stonework. “Brilliant, Phillip. Expensive, annoying, time-consuming, but brilliant.”

“But that’s not marriage,” Phillip objects as Thorne rights himself. “Marriage is harder.”

“Not really. Just be your sweet, adoring self and she’ll be perfectly happy.”

“But what if…” Phillip stares across the bridgeless gulf to the opposite shore. “But what if I’m not?” he asks, and a cold silence falls.

“All right, listen.” Thorne fists Phillip’s collar; his sea-green eyes have darkened to fathoms. “Listen to me. You have to marry my sister. If you don’t, my father will give her to Nathaniel Gerard.”

“But…”

“He won’t treat her right, Phillip!” Thorne’s voice rises. “She’ll be nothing but a pretty piece of furniture for his estate. He’ll run around boozing and schmoozing and getting into every skirt in town, and then he’ll come back and smack her around and yell at the children. But that pretty piece of furniture…that’s my sister.” His grip tightens. “That’s my sister, Phillip, not some pawn in a chess game, and I want to know she’ll be all right!”

“I don’t think he’s that bad,” Phillip says helplessly, already knowing he’ll lose, already knowing Eric Thorne will win, already knowing he’ll grow old with Agnes Thorne. “He’s a hothead, yeah, and he drinks, but at least with him it’s just skirts, not trousers.”

“You think I care about that?” At this scant distance, Phillip sees the real hints of fear behind Thorne’s fury. “Phillip, you’re a good person. You’re good. You’re so good you sicken me. And…” His throat clicks. “I know she’ll be safe with you. Besides her, you’re…you’re the only person I’ve ever loved.”

Phillip blinks, taken aback. “Not like that, you lout,” Thorne says, releasing his collar and punching him playfully. His eyes have lost that frightening gravitas, but the remnants still weigh on his smile. “Kiss me and I’ll push you off this bridge, and don’t think I won’t.”

“I wouldn’t,” Phillip promises, and he means it. “You’re not like that for me either. You’re…you’re more like my brother.”

Thorne smiles. “You’re my brother, too,” he says quietly as Phillip ducks his head. “You see? You’re already part of the family. Now,” he says, taking Phillip’s hand, and his grip is cold and desperate, “say you’ll marry her. Please, Phillip. As you love me.”

And Phillip does love him. Other than Agnes—how odd that they have that in common—he’s never truly loved anyone. And he’s fairly certain no one else has ever loved him. “I promise,” he says, lifting his gaze to Thorne’s—slowly, because he lifts the weight of the world with it. “I’ll keep her safe for you.”

“And you won’t let me lose her?”

“No.” He presses Thorne’s hand, and that desperate look begins to fade. “I won’t let you lose her. To anyone.”

“Someone’s out there,” Helen says dully, and Caroline glances up from her homework to see a carriage pulling up outside the house.

A stir moves through the sitting-room, disturbing the quiet. This used to be a pleasant tradition, these evenings. The five of them would sit together when there were no shows, reading or working or just chatting idly as the fire burned merrily in the hearth, but now their gatherings wear the pall of a wake. And it’s all her fault.

“I’ll go.” Her father gets up from the couch where he’s looking over her mother’s household accounts; the old anxious furrow has returned to his brows since that horrible Night. Strange how in two weeks the world has tilted and slid everything off into the abyss.

As he strides out to the hall, Helen leans back against Phillip’s side, staring off into nothing. He’s reading a book by someone named Alexander Pushkin; his free hand scratches lightly at Helen’s head. Usually he whips through novels at a tremendous pace, but lately he can’t seem to focus; his left leg jitters and he keeps glancing at the little table by his elbow as if expecting something to be there. She knows what that something is. Because Phillip’s Not Well. Again.

Leaving her mother’s side, she twitches aside the curtain to look out. As her father descends the porch steps, the carriage door opens and James Gordon Bennett steps out into the chilly October twilight. He looks even grimmer than usual. The two men carry on a brief conversation, and then her father’s broad shoulders slump as Bennett hands him a note. Bennett watches as her father braces himself on the fence, then steps forward and briefly palms his upper arm. It’s a strangely touching gesture from a man cold in speech and taciturn in manner, and her heart warms unexpectedly.

After a moment, her father raises his head and they shake hands. Bennett turns and climbs back into his carriage as her father mounts the porch steps, his usually energetic stride heavy and slow.

“What is it?” Phillip asks, sitting up as her father re-enters the room. He lowers his book, slipping his spectacles absently into his breast pocket; he only wears them when he reads for extended periods, a concession to a mild case of farsightedness.

“Bennett.” Her father glances at her mother, sharing one of their unreadable looks, and then raises the note. “He has some news.”

Nobody passes the obvious quip. “The story will break tomorrow.” Her father looks so tired that she almost runs to him and casts her arms around him and begs his forgiveness for making him look that way. But pride holds her back, and shame, and that flare of resentment at the memory of him bellowing Don’t tell me he did this and then tell me he loves you! “There was nothing anyone could do. He’ll spare you as much as he can, but there’s only so much he can publish without risking retribution.”

Charity sighs, a long, ragged sound. “Oh, Caroline,” she murmurs, taking her in her arms, and suddenly she’s painfully aware of how much taller she is than the woman who used to carry her. “I’m so sorry.”

Phillip sets aside his book and stands, gently shedding her younger sister. His eyes are hollow and dim as Helen glides soundlessly toward the stairs, her newfound strategy in a house that seems to have no more place for her. “PT, may I have a word?” he asks quietly, and her father’s mouth pinches, but he nods as if he's been expecting this.

They disappear into the study. After a few minutes, she hears her father calling them. As she balks, suddenly afraid of she knows not what, her mother takes her hand—how cold her grip feels—and tugs her gently forward. “It’s all right,” she says quietly, and for the first time her playful, vivacious mother looks old. “Everything will be all right.”

Her father is seated at his desk. His brow is dark, his face stern and strained. Phillip sits across from him in his usual armchair, one leg crossed over the other, the fingers of his left hand bracing his temple. His face is averted, his eyes closed; her father doesn’t look at him. And suddenly she knows exactly what just passed between them, knows all the things that will never pass between them again because of it, and a howl of grief and loss rises in her like a winter gale.

“Phillip has made an offer.” Her father’s jaw works; he can’t seem to look her in the eye. “If you’re willing.”

“An offer,” she echoes in a trembling voice.

“Of marriage.” He shakes his head. “I’m sorry, Caroline. It’s the only other thing left to suggest.”

She feels the strength run out of her legs. Her mother braces her, murmuring something indecipherable. “You decided this without me?” she manages to ask.

“The decision is yours.” Phillip doesn’t look up; the fingers bracing his temple tremble as if he barely has the strength to prop up his own head. “It’s only an offer.”

“Only an offer,” she echoes. Her childish fantasies about his cheeky grin and trim physique seem weak and silly now. Even her initial urge to beg him for the protection of marriage seems like nothing more than a naïf’s cowardly whim. To wear Phillip’s ring on her finger…to kiss Phillip’s lips…to lie in Phillip’s bed…to see Phillip naked…

To have him see her naked...

“Obviously we wouldn’t…” He flinches. “You would live here,” he amends. “With your parents. And I would…wait. Until…if…you ever…”

“Marry you,” she repeats, and her father flinches from it, too. “Be your wife.”

“There would be no obligations.” He doesn’t open his eyes. “No expectations. I would be faithful no matter what you did or didn’t do. I would never initiate a divorce, but if you ever wanted one, I would give it to you without question. This isn’t meant to restrict your future. It’s just a way to give it back to you.”

“But…but Anne…”

“Anne is aware.” Phillip’s fingers press harder into his temple; sweat has beaded along his brow. “She’s fine with it.”

Stone after stone is falling out from under her feet. Every handhold she grabs crumbles under her fingers. “If he runs over to the Herald now, Bennett can still include the announcement in tomorrow’s edition,” her father says, still not looking at her or Phillip or anywhere in particular. “If you’re engaged, it’ll take the edge off the accusations. It’s possible some people will even think Thorne invented the rumours out of jealousy.”

“No,” she says, amazed at her brazenness. “He didn’t. And this is not a solution.”

They all look at her, even Phillip. “I didn’t steal anything,” she goes on. “I didn’t kill anyone. I got pregnant. Why am I being treated like a criminal?” And why does Eric get to keep his life and mine is forfeit?

“Because that’s the way the world is, Caroline.” Her father looks so old. So beaten. “I wish to God I could tell you it wasn’t.”

“It never stopped you before,” she mutters, and his face hardens.

“I have tried to make this bearable for you. And just so you know, this isn't exactly my idea of a solution either. But you’ve rejected every option we’ve come up with.” He ticks them off on his fingers, fingers that have clumsily braided her hair and whisked fantastical sketches into being at her whim and stroked away the tears from all her little disappointments. “You don’t want to pass your lying-in at a country home with your mother. You don’t want to try reconciling with your grandparents and winter with them in the South. You don’t want to marry Phillip and give your baby a father.” He lowers his hands. “I admire your courage, and I admire a person who knows her own mind, but at some point you are going to run out of options. And without options, this world is a very cruel place.”

“All I want is Eric.”

“Well, you can’t have him. And whatever you may think, that’s not my doing.” Her father’s voice rises as he does. “I hate to break it to you, sweetheart, but some men only want one thing, and after they get it, they’re gone.”

“I don’t think he’s like that. I think he’s gone because of you.” She wants to stop, the same way she knew she should tell someone about the trysts the moment they started, but her mouth has the bit between its teeth. “Everything you are ruined everything I wanted to be. You and your…your wishes and your dreams! That stupid wishing-machine…” Ballet slippers. Why, oh why did she ever wish for ballet slippers? “It was just odds and ends from your briefcase. You didn’t even remember it was my birthday. You just threw it together at the last minute.”

“You’ll have to forgive me for that.” His face is tight and pale. “I had just been pink-slipped from the only job that was keeping a roof over our heads. I was a little preoccupied, not to mention a little broke.”

“Then how could you tell me to wish?” she cries, tears springing to her eyes. “How could you tell me to dream? How could you tell me to ask for the world from a useless piece of junk that couldn’t hear me and wouldn’t care if it did?”

“Because I was the wishing-machine, Caroline!” Her father slams his fists against his chest. Tears overspill his eyes, glittering like diamonds on his weathered cheeks. “A broken one, I know, but I loved you. I love you.” His voice cracks. “I was poor. I was ignorant. I was friendless. I had nothing. I was nothing. My love was the only real thing about me.”

“Well, it didn’t feel real when you abandoned us for Jenny Lind.” She’s shaking, desperate to stop, desperate to finally expel the sickness she’s kept in all these years. “I have never been able to escape that. Eric Thorne was my only way out.” She sucks in a breath to calm herself, but it only fuels the fire. “Before I shamed you, you shamed me. If you were going to ruin everything by running away with her, then why didn’t you just stay away?”

His face goes sheet-white. For a horrible moment she thinks she’s finally done it—she’s broken her father’s heart and stopped it cold. “PT,” Phillip says lowly, starting up from his chair with a look of alarm. “PT, are you…”

“I’m fine.” His stentorian bellow has weakened to a whisper. His eyes are shocky and wide. “You’re right. It’s my fault. I’m sorry.” He looks at Charity. “Whatever she wants,” he goes on in that awful whisper. “Just…make sure it’s what she wants.”

He drops into his chair, looking like a man stunned by a blow. Phillip stays where he is for a moment, stricken and silent, and then he trudges for the door. “We’ll let you know,” Charity murmurs as he passes, and he nods without looking up.

The front door opens, then clicks. Without a word, her mother takes her arm and guides her back to the sitting-room. Then she turns her to look at her. For the first time Caroline sees not her mother but the woman who left everything to run away with a fast-talking dreamer, a woman who took awful risks and bore the consequences and held her head up despite it.

“You’ve been terribly wronged, and I will be the first to admit that your father has made some awful mistakes.” Her mother’s hazel eyes brim in the twilight through the window. “But make no mistake about this.” She points at the study with a trembling finger. “You will never find a man who loves you more than that one does."

Whatever was left of the dam shatters. Covering her face, Caroline collapses on the sofa as her mother holds her, wishing to nothing that she had fallen to her death the very first night she climbed out her window.

So maybe it’s not a surprise that the following night’s show is an unmitigated disaster.

It’s been a rough night, protesters outnumbering patrons two to one. News travels fast, it seems. Phillip is in centre ring and doing his best not to look like he’d rather be in a bar when his voice suddenly stops as if cut with a knife.

There’s a groan from the audience and a collective jeer, and then whatever performers were onstage rush back with Phillip on their heels. “What happened?” Barnum demands as Phillip drops to his knees over a water trough, scrubbing something dark and wet out of his eyes.

“It’s not feces.” His voice is thready, his hands trembling. “It’s just mud. But it’s all over my coat.”

Barnum bends to help him take it off. Phillip shrugs off his hands and strips it off himself, then follows it with his white silk shirt. “This is bad,” he says, tossing both garments aside and bending back over the trough in his undershirt and suspenders. “I haven’t seen it like this since the first year.”

It’s good of him not to mention Jenny Lind. “What’s your gut on this?” Barnum asks quietly as Phillip scrubs at his hair with a towel. His partner is the one with experience producing shows; Barnum trusts that experience over his own instincts, which scream at him to ride the wave of scandal to its chaotic end.

“We need to shut it down.” Phillip throws the towel in the corner in a rare display of viciousness. “We can’t put the performers through that.”

Reflexively, Barnum pops his pocket-watch. Still an hour and change. They’ll have to issue refunds. “PT, let O’Malley do it,” Phillip says as Barnum snaps the watch shut. “Don’t go out into that.”

“This is still my show.” Tossing aside his hat and cane, Barnum heads for the arena. His boots smack the packed dirt with every step. “And it’s a circus, not a goddamn zoo.”

“We’ll make it up next time,” Phillip says quietly as he strides away.

“No we won’t,” he says without looking back. “Don’t let the performers come out. They don't need to deal with this.”

The moment he steps into the limelight, the volume spikes. “Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention?” Tentative cheers and enthusiastic boos. “I regret to announce that tonight’s show will be ending early.” Groans and jeers. “Those of you who bought tickets in good faith, we thank you. You’ll be reimbursed at the window. As for the rest of you, the exits are clearly marked.”

There’s a fresh round of booing as distressed patrons gather their belongings. “I ain’t paying for half a show,” one of the more vocal hecklers shouts, easily two hundred and fifty pounds of social disgruntlement. “Give me my money, you oversized dandy!”

Barnum holds his ground as a dozen other voices echo the sentiment. “I’ve already explained our policy,” he says, squaring his broad shoulders and planting his feet, letting them get a good look at his six-foot-three of hard-forged strength. “If you want your money’s worth, I suggest you refrain from interrupting the performers.”

“You know what I suggest?” The man descends the risers, thumping to the ground with a crowd gathering behind him. From the corner of his eye, Barnum sees movement from backstage as the protesters swell in the dozens. “That you take your friends and that little slut out of our city. If you don’t, we’ll drag her out by her hair and show her what a whore really…”

The man’s nose explodes under his fist. He feels it mash against the man’s skull, reverting to a spongy mass of blood and tissue; bone slivers drive into the calloused skin between his knuckles like tiny pokers. With a wet grunt, two hundred and fifty pounds of pure hate hit the dirt as he dances back.

Barnum doesn’t pause to check his handiwork. He simply turns to face the next attacker, raising his split and bloody knuckles to the level of his eyes, and begins fighting for his life.

There are too many. He sees that—he sees performers pour out between the risers with angry shouts to meet surging protesters that seem to multiply like rabbits—but it makes no difference to what he has to do. He downs another man with his fist and kicks away a third, and he wrestles two more that come at him as a pair, and then the sheer weight of piling bodies drags him down to the dirt. He scraps and kicks and snarls the way he did as a freshly-hired railroad hand, still a skinny, half-starved sixteen, armed with nothing but bitter determination and a redwood-sized chip on his shoulder.

As he rolls away in the confusion, torn and bleeding, something heavy smacks into his right thigh. It instantly goes numb, dropping out from under him, and he yelps and hits the dirt. That’s followed by a blow to his belly with the butt end that leaves him staggered and breathless. Dragging his stunned leg behind him, he tries to get some distance, pulling himself weakly along even as the protesters descend, laughing and jeering at their crippled prey.

He won’t die this way. He won’t crawl pitifully on his belly like an insect toyed with by cruel boys. With an effort he flips onto his back, propping himself on his elbows, gritting his teeth as they come on. A million dreams, he thinks as the foremost protester begins to raise the two-by-four in meaty hands, and it ends in this nightmare.

As the joist begins its upward swing, he hears the rapid tattoo of paddock boots.

Phillip Carlyle bursts onto the scene, one of Deng’s tapered swords gripped in both hands, a man of mercury fully in motion. He’s leaning into a spin even as he comes between them, hipshot and leading with his right leg, every muscle in his arms and shoulders coiled like the loins of a racehorse. For a moment Barnum sees every detail in fantastical clarity—the tiny sweat-diamonds popping out on his back and shoulders, the tendons corded and taut in his arms, a shocking sense of power funneled into precision instead of pulverization—and then the tip of the sword flirts across the protester’s beefy chest.

The suspenders over his voluminous girth snap like overstressed cables—tak, tak—and the sword inks a dainty filament of red across the length of the man's clavicle. As the tip flicks out the other side, Phillip expels a breath—pah, neat and disciplined and forceful—and completes his controlled spin to clear the protester’s path by bare inches.

The unsupported trousers drop like the jaw of a scandalized patron. Tangled in his own clothes, the protester trips and falls with a flailing exuberance that would make a first-rate pratfall during the clown segment. He hits the dirt a foot away from Barnum’s sprawled boots with a chuff like locomotive steam, his teeth clacking like castanets, the joist thrown harmlessly to one side. Perfectly on cue, the sword tip whisks down and freezes under the man’s jaw, right where the artery pulses against ruddy flesh. “If even one man moves,” Phillip calls to the crowd, and Barnum’s flesh erupts in chilly bumps, “I will turn this man’s carotid into a fountain.”

To a man, the onrushing protesters halt. They look at the man on the ground, then at Phillip, then each other. They don’t seem to know what to do with a ringmaster who uses prop swords to make deadly threats. Barnum doesn’t know what to do with it either. And clearly Deng is sharpening her tools rather exuberantly.

“I am sick of watching cowards ruin good people.” Phillip’s voice thrums with the tension of a high wire. His right trouser leg, tailored to be scandalously tight, has split along his muscular thigh. “He’s worth ten of you in a fight, so you bring forty. He could crush any of you with his bare hands, so you come at him with weapons. He stands taller than any of us could ever hope to do, so you drag him down to the dirt. And despite that—despite all you’ve done and all you’ve threatened to do—he would let you walk away if you begged for mercy.”

He shifts the tip of the sword until a bead of blood pops out against the cruel point. “So you have two options,” he says as the protester’s breath hitches in alarm. “Number one, you can avail yourselves of Mr Barnum’s mercy and your friend will be returned to you unharmed—well outside the circus perimeter.”

“Number two?” the closest man asks, eyeing that sword—still for the time being, but making no promises.

“Number two.” Phillip’s voice is cold. “I’ll cut you down as you rush me, one by one, until either I run out of bodies or you disarm me. The disarming can be done—but I'll sell his life dearly.”

The man must see something in his face, because he nods. “Fair enough,” he says quietly. “Let’s go, boys." One by one, and then in growing waves, the protesters turn and filter slowly toward the exits.

Phillip keeps that bright tip where it is until four strapping roustabouts run up. “Run him out of here,” he orders grimly as they haul the man to his feet, his doughy thighs jiggling under the bright lights. “And I’m not particular about where you drop him.”

Grinning ominously, the roustabouts propel the protester out of the tent at high speed, ignoring his hollers. Dropping the sword in the sawdust—he’s usually so fastidious with the props—Phillip falls to his knees. “Are you all right?” he asks tersely, businesslike as he frisks him except for the telling crease between his brows. “Barnum?”

“Fine.” He works himself up on his elbows, wincing as he tries to stretch out his right leg. The thick outer muscle feels numb at the site of the blow, but pain radiates outward in grim lines. “Bastard hit me with something. A joist, I think…”

He shouts as Phillip presses lightly with his fingertips against the abused flesh. “Don't move,” Phillip orders. Stripping off his undershirt, he wraps it tightly around Barnum’s thigh as WD and Angus sprint over. “Guys, help me with him.”

“You didn’t tell me,” Barnum rasps as they prepare to hoist him. “I didn’t know.”

“What?” Preoccupied with his task, Phillip doesn’t look up. “Didn’t know what?”

“That.” Barnum snatches another breath. “That you…” He expels it. “That.”

Phillip glances at his face, and then he smiles, and for a moment he’s beautiful again. “Oh, that,” he says with his unique blend of cheeky self-deprecation. “I would never tell you that.”

“Why not?” Barnum asks with a tinge of petulance as WD and Angus brace their arms under and around him.

Phillip shrugs one bare shoulder. “Mostly,” he says as Lettie bellows commands to restore order, “I was afraid you’d turn it into an act.”

That night, Phillip wakes from a terrible dream of the old man to find himself pounding on his father’s front door.

He has no idea how he got there. He has no memory of having walked from his Greenwich Village apartment through half of Manhattan in the dead of night. He’s aware of only two things: an overpowering urge to run far away from the limping footsteps, and a sense that this is not the right door, that time has doubled back on itself and he’s meant to be somewhere else, that he’s somehow missed his appointment.

“Let me in.” His voice is husky with sleep and unshed tears. “Please let me in.”

Nobody answers; the door doesn’t open; the windows remain shuttered. “One, two, and six-tenths,” he intones against his will; “easy on the bit and cut in.”

Still that cold silence. And slowly he comes back to himself, to an awareness of his disheveled, half-dressed shame.

If he were drunk, he would sit down and sob bitterly against his knees. But he’s not drunk. He’s painfully, viscerally sober, and his main thought is that PT Barnum must not be summoned from his family at three in the morning to drag his sleepwalking partner home.

So he stumbles down the pillared portico’s palatial steps and across the flagstoned courtyard, hoping to flee before his father can take any drastic measures, and finds the massive cast-iron gates locked.

That’s odd. Odd that the tribal outcast should be locked in instead of out, and odd that he should have gotten inside at all. He scaled the spiked fence now and then as a teenager at great risk to his reproductive prospects, but he’s thirty-five now—a nimble and muscular thirty-five, but without the primordial agility of boyhood. And he hasn’t forgotten his father’s investment in a particularly nasty type of spike colloquially known as Vlad’s Notch (“Vlad’s Crotch,” Eric Thorne muttered to him once at a dinner party in proper adolescent fashion, and Phillip promptly choked on his asparagus).

As he paces the length of the gates like a caged tiger, isolated flashes of the journey burst in his memory like fireworks. He remembers, in particular, passing by Gramercy Park and wishing, willing himself to turn aside to a friendlier door. The rest is darkness…except, of course, for a suffocating sense of weariness—the maddening desperation to just stop walking—and being driven on by the sound of those dragging, dogged footsteps.

And somewhere in a moonlit clearing, the image of a man, larger than life in his crimson coat, pointing a gun at the sky, and the fatal count that will never reach three.

He’s leaning his brow against the cool iron of the gate—it’s a blessed counterpoint to his fevered thoughts and the Kafkaesque weirdness of this post-midnight, predawn limbo—when he hears the double doors open behind him.

“Get in here.” His father’s voice is sepulchral. “I won’t have you making a scene.”

He doesn’t want to go in. But he’s tired and cold and the phantom footsteps still dog him, so he crosses back through the silent courtyard and allows his father to seal him in.

“I didn’t mean to come here.” As his dressing-gowned father pours himself a snifter of brandy from the study cabinet, Phillip leans his forehead against the window. The stars are cold and dead above him. “I was sleepwalking.”

Even from this angle, Carlyle Sr’s sharp glance isn’t lost on him. “Again?” he asks.

“I was dreaming about the old man.” Phillip closes his eyes. Concentrates on the cool glass against his brow. “Don’t ask me what the rest was about.”

“By the old man, I assume you mean the Gimper.”

Phillip opens his eyes. “I forgot about him,” he murmurs. He utters a low laugh. “Of course. Robert Gerard…the Gimper…my subconscious conflated them.”

“If you will.” Carlyle Sr thrusts the bottle back into the cabinet. “You’re drinking again. I always know.”

“Don’t start with me.” Phillip turns abruptly and heads for his father’s desk. He picks up a book of matches from the heavy-bottomed crystal ashtray and fumbles the crumpled pack of Old Judge from his pocket.

“For God’s sake, Phillip.” Casting himself into his ornate armchair by the fire, Carlyle Sr watches him with curled lip. “Even your manliest habits are dainty.”

“Let me guess.” He strikes a match. “Cigars are the ultimate phallic symbol.”

“If we must be crass, yes.”

“You’re probably right about that.” He lights his cigarette. “Which begs the question: If you think it looks so much like an erect penis, why are you putting it in your mouth?”

Carlyle Sr chokes on his next sip of brandy. That petty point scored—and there’s no other kind—Phillip waves out the match and drops it in the ashtray. Perching in the opposite armchair, he pulls his legs up to his chest with his bare toes curling over the edge. “On a different subject,” Carlyle Sr intones, giving his son’s filthy feet a critical glance, “shall I expect to be snubbed at your impending nuptials?”

“I’m not marrying her.” He unrolls a coil of ash on one bare knee. “She declined.”

“I see.” Carlyle Sr takes another sip. “I’m sure her father is bitterly disappointed.”

Phillip flinches. “And there it is,” Carlyle Sr says with a grim smile. “The definitive pronouncement on your worth from the one man you’ve accepted as its appraiser.”

“Stop.”

“It was no Benjamin Hallett that rejected you,” Carlyle Sr continues. “Nor was it Theodore Carlyle. It was Phineas Taylor Barnum, the man who rejects no one, the man who can stomach every aberrance but you.”

“Would you stop?”

“By all means, if you can otherwise explain it.” Carlyle Sr waits a beat before going on. “He is drawn to the grotesqueries of the human form. The malformations, the malignities, the monstrosities, the…dare I say mistakes.” His cold eyes rake him. “Given that your cherubic aspect hardly inspires his brand of fascination, have you ever asked yourself what drew him to you?”

Phillip stares at the cigarette’s glowing tip. “Every day of my life,” he whispers.

“That’s simple enough.” Carlyle Sr’s eyes glitter in the firelight. “The deformities of his other acquisitions are immediately observable, but in you, the true grotesquerie is concealed.” He points at Phillip’s chest. “In there. Your heart is a twisted, bloated, cancerous deformity, and it takes a keen intuition to divine it. I will say this for the man: he has that intuition in spades. And no doubt it was once fascinating, until the tumor grew so repulsive that it sickened even him.” He draws a sibilant breath through his teeth. “Dear God, what have I raised?” he utters, staring at the snapping flames. “How is it that my namesake has no place even in a freak show?”

Phillip looks away, but that’s no better; his reflection stares back at him in the window, dishevelled and hollow-cheeked. “I hate you,” he whispers, and his reflection mouths it back.

“And as for you,” Carlyle Sr says, lifting his snifter again, “you would have been better born dead.”

He tosses back a mouthful of brandy as Phillip struggles to check his tears. Against one wall, the imposing grandfather clock chimes off the hour. One, two, and six-tenths; easy on the bit and cut in.

“Why didn’t you ever take joy in us?” Phillip asks abruptly, turning to him. “Michael and me,” he clarifies when Carlyle Sr stares at him. “You never took joy in your children. I can’t remember you ever smiling at something I did or laughing at a joke I made. I can’t remember you ever praising me for being clever or kind or a hard worker. I bent over backwards to make you proud and all I got were criticisms and frowns.”

“Do you smile as often as he would like?”

“Well…”

“There you are.” Carlyle Sr sips his brandy. “You complain unceasingly about your disappointments as a child, but what about mine as a parent? I am not what you wanted in a father, but have you ever considered that you were not what I wanted in a son?”

“I don’t have to consider it,” Phillip says softly. “I know it.”

“And where is the difference?” Carlyle Sr purrs. “Do you suppose PT Barnum is pleased with his daughter?”

“He disapproves of what she did. Not of who she is.”

“How sweet,” Carlyle Sr drawls. “Will he still approve of her should she run off with Eric Thorne or raise her child to despise its grandfather? Or suppose you elect to act as father to the little brat. Should that child grow up to despise the circus and its trappings and declare its odd, drunken, promiscuous, unsmiling father a bitter disappointment, how will you feel?”

He gives Phillip no chance for rebuttal. “If you knew that child would liquidate your share of the circus to build his own aristocratic enterprise, would you still will it to him? Or would you cut him out of your will to preserve your other, more important legacy? Should he declare your father of choice and your bizarre friends and your mixed-breed lover déclassé and turn to champagne and high society, would you still approve of who he is? Or would you consider him in some way broken or deluded, and tell him so with the aim of changing him into something of which you could approve? And—failing that—would you allow him to continue insulting your loved ones and embarrassing your associates and damaging your business, or would you as a last resort bid him keep his distance from you and yours lest he destroy everything you hold dear?”

“I don’t know what I’d do,” Phillip says when no other answer comes to mind. “I suppose I would try to love him as best as I could despite those things.” He shakes his head. “I would probably ask myself where I went so wrong.”

“And are parents always to blame for their children’s failings?” Carlyle Sr’s expression is grim. “What did you say to PT Barnum on that score? Did you produce a list of all the ways he had failed as a father? Or did you comfort him with the assertion that children are not puppets on strings, moving only when we tell them and only as we bid them? Was there, even in his unflagging devotion, a hint—the merest suggestion—of ingratitude on her part?”

Phillip draws his legs closer, a subconscious shield against his father’s scrutiny. “And might it not be true?” Carlyle Sr goes on with the soft caress of a blade. “Is it possible that Caroline Barnum might retain her more amiable qualities and yet not entirely realize the lengths to which her father has gone to make her life…shall I say bearable, or dare I say agreeable? Am I mistaken, or have there been many times when PT Barnum went hungry or cold or sleepless so that she did not, so that the only lack she would ever perceive in her life would be the absence of ballet slippers?”

Phillip closes his eyes. Behind his eyelids, he pictures a younger, lonelier labourer lying in bed next to his golden-haired wife, warming her slumber while he himself stares sleeplessly at the ceiling with worry-lines prematurely creasing his face, trying in vain to spin dreams into gold on an empty stomach that keeps rudely interrupting. And across town, a drunk and jaded libertine screams and shatters a priceless antique against the wall, too miserable to care about the wanton destruction and too ignorant to know that he and that hungry dreamer each hold the solution to the other’s misery.

“I’ll do it.” He opens his eyes, looking directly into his father’s. “I’ll leave the circus. That’s what you’ve been trying to get me to do for the past six years, isn’t it? I’ll cut all ties with the Barnums and everyone associated with them. I’ll join your enterprise and wear respectable suits and marry whomever you want. And I’ll never speak of them again. All I ask in return is your help.”

“My help?” Carlyle Sr asks coldly, but a hint of astonishment mars the effect.

“Making sure Eric Thorne never hurts them again.” He forces the words past a tightening throat. This must be what the samurai feels as he presses the tip of his blade against his belly and pushes. “You have influence. You have resources. You did it once, nineteen years ago. I’m asking you to do it again.” His voice thickens. “As your son. In return, I’ll do anything you want. You have my word, and I’ll make it good.”

The clock ticks off the seconds as the world holds its breath. “No,” Carlyle Sr says, setting his drink down with a decisive clink. “I have had more than enough scandal for my taste. And Michael has produced sufficient heirs; I have no need to scrape one out of the gutter. No, you may continue on your wasteful way. I have no need of a prodigal son.”

If it were possible, Phillip is more stunned than he ever was after his father’s hand crossed his face. “But,” he utters at last, and his voice sounds like the voice of a small boy, “but I’m offering to come back home.”

“You offer what I no longer want.” Carlyle Sr turns those cold eyes on him again. “You once told me you had no more need of me, having found people who would treat you as you deserved. Now, those who insist on independence must reap its rewards.”

“Don’t do this.” How strange to hear PT Barnum’s echo in his own voice. “I need you. He needs you.”

“What have I to do with PT Barnum?” Carlyle Sr flings the notion away with one blue-veined hand. “That smirking, sneaking simpleton. If a horse thief will steal an unruly stallion, he has no one to blame but himself for its depredations. His punishment is to ride it to the bitter end.”

“Father, don’t!” As Carlyle Sr makes to move, Phillip casts himself on his knees, grabbing for his father’s hands. “Please don’t make me leave. I can’t fix it by myself. I love them. I want to help them. Help me fix it!”

“Get off me!” His face twisting in disgust, Carlyle Sr casts him off and rises, looking down at him as he would a cockroach in a gutter. “I would no more truck with you than I would flirt with your flophouse whores. Go die at your master’s feet like a dog if he will suffer it, but if not, then find some suitable place to do it. There is no such place here.”

“For the love of God…!”

“God!” Carlyle Sr expels a harsh laugh. “You have not darkened His doorstep for many a year. What have you to do with God—you thankless, spineless, godless wretch?”

He turns away. “Yes, yes I am godless!” Stumbling to his feet, Phillip’s voice rises to the rafters. “Why should that come as a surprise? You made me that way. Why the hell would I want to believe in any god that looks like you?”

He doesn't give his father a chance to rebut. And this time when he reaches the gates, they're standing wide open.

Chapter Text

It’s the night everything will go wrong, and sixteen-year-old Phillip Carlyle is climbing the south wall of the Thorne estate, dressed in his darkest riding coat and trousers, hoping to go unnoticed.

Grabbing the railing of Eric Thorne’s balcony, he hauls himself up until his dark head protrudes over the top. He pssts at the double doors; beyond them, a shadow flits furtively. “Eric,” he calls softly when there’s no response. “Come on, everyone’s waiting.”

“Will you hush?” Eric Thorne emerges from his room, dressed in similar garb. When he sees Phillip, he utters a dramatic sigh. “O Romeo, Romeo,” he groans, draping himself dramatically over the railing as Phillip snickers. “Wherefore art thou Romeo? Deny thy father and refuse thy name; or, if thou wilt not…”

“Stop.” Still snickering, Phillip adjusts his footing on the stonework. “Don’t make me laugh. I’ll fall.”

“Fall on your sword, then, lovesick swain.” Thorne’s eyes gleam wickedly. “Or Noah Oliver’s, though it won’t pierce deeper than an inch.”

“Eric?” coos a high voice coos from within his room, and both boys start guiltily. “Are you there?”

“Oh, shit.” Thorne casts about with his hands like a naked man searching for a towel. “She’s supposed to be in bed!”

“Well, make her go back! If your parents hear…”

Before Thorne can answer, a little golden-haired pixie in a white nightgown floats out to the balcony. “Agnes,” Thorne says with anxious warmth, moving dexterously to block her view of Phillip. “What are you doing up?”

“I had a bad dream.” She lifts her pretty sharp face to his, drawn with grave anxiety. “About the Gimper.”

“What, this again?” Thorne bends down, planting his hands on his knees. “We settled all that long ago. Besides, ten is much too old to believe in fairy-stories.”

“I don’t, Eric,” Agnes insists, tears springing into her soft eyes, “but the dream scared me. He was limping down the hall, and he said, ‘On the count of three, I’m coming to get you.’ And then he started counting, but I woke up just before he got to three.”

“All right, love, all right.” Thorne kneels and pulls her in. Their golden curls mingle as she lays her ringlets on his shoulder, gleaming with muted luster under the moonlight. “That’s all right.”

“Don’t go, Eric,” she says, her voice muffled on his shoulder. “I’m afraid.”

“Why on earth would you be afraid, my dove?”

“I don’t know. I just am.”

“Nonsense.” With a resigned sigh, he turns her in Phillip’s direction. “Who can be afraid with Knight Phillip at hand?”

Her face transforms. “Phillip!” she cries, running to him as both boys frantically hush her. “Mother told me I’ll marry you when I grow up,” she says, her eyes sparkling with starlight. "She says you already know." She looks at him with endearing shyness. “May I?”

“But of course.” Affecting a Parisian accent, Phillip takes her hand and bestows a grave kiss on the back. He prays she doesn’t see the hints of pain in his face or smell the fresh liquor on his breath. “I await your good pleasure, mam’selle.”

She giggles. “Will you really?” she asks as Phillip releases her hand.

“Why wouldn’t I?” He affects surprise. “Are you not the princess? And am I not the prince? And what do princes have to do except wait at balconies?”

She giggles again. “Lovely boy,” she pronounces, touching his cheek. Then she turns back to her brother. “Come tuck me in, Eric. Please.”

“I can’t, Aggie. Father or Mother might hear, and then I won’t escape this house for the next two decades.” Shushing her protests, Thorne squats to her level. “I’ll make you a deal,” he says, taking her gowned shoulders. “If you’re very, very brave and go in by yourself, I’ll tuck you in next time. I’ll carry you in just like I used to when you were little and I'll lay you right down on your pillow.” He smiles winningly. “Is that a deal?”

She hedges, glancing nervously into the dark house. “I’ll be back before you know it,” he persists, tucking a stray ringlet behind her ear. “When you wake up, I’ll be there. And I’ll tell you all about the scent of blue flag under the stars.”

“Why?” she asks, tucking her head coyly on one side. “Are you racing in the Devil’s Fallow?”

“Never mind what we’re doing,” he says with the short good-humour that is the sole province of older brothers with their sisters. “You’re going back to bed, that’s all you need to know.”

“But I want to smell the blue flag,” she protests weakly as he herds her toward the doors. “And I want to see Phillip race.”

“You’ll see Phillip race next week at the picnic.” He gives the small of her back one last little push. “Now go to bed or I’ll be cross with you, and then Father will be cross with me.”

As he and Thorne spider nimbly toward the ground, Phillip glances up one more time. Agnes has returned to the railing, her slight hands perched on the cool stone. She’s turned her face away from the moon to gaze down at him, and her troubled brow is woven with shadows.

PT Barnum is dreaming, and it’s bad.

He’s at the show again, the protesters converging on his recumbent form, the foremost raising his weapon to strike the deadly blow. Only it’s not a protester. It’s Phillip Carlyle, and the weapon isn’t a joist but a sword.

“Phillip, please.” He can’t move, can’t even raise his hands in defense against the lethal fluidity that goes beyond sport fencing. “Phillip, don’t do this!”

Miraculously, Phillip stops in his tracks, lowering the sword. “It’s one or the other,” he says, and suddenly they’re not at the circus but in a moonlit field with the sound of distant hoofbeats and the smell of blue flag in the air. “Choose, PT. Me or you.”

Overwhelmed by the impossible demand, Barnum just shakes his head. “All right then,” Phillip says, raising the sword. “I’ll choose.”

Before Barnum can speak, Phillip turns the tip of the sword inward and plunges it toward his belly. Barnum opens his mouth to scream and finds he can’t; his tongue has gone as dead as his leg. And then he feels hands shaking him, practically clawing him out of his dream, and Charity is calling his name.

“He chose himself.” He babbles heedlessly as he surfaces, still trying to ward off that final unspeakable image. “I made him choose. He chose himself.”

“Phineas, wake up.” Her face hovers over his, frightened and white, and now he hears another sound: a low wailing from down the hall. “It’s Helen. She had a nightmare. I can’t get her to calm down. She’s hysterical.”

He’s out of bed before his body remembers it was clobbered to within an inch of its life only hours ago. “I’m fine,” he gasps as Charity flutters helplessly above him on the floor. “Remember, Sam said it’s just a case of dead leg.” He grabs the cane from his bedside and levers himself up. Those haunting wails fill the hall. “I’m coming.”

Helen is sitting up in bed when he limps in, shaking with uncontrollable sobs, clutching her shoulders with clawed hands. When she sees her father, she utters a wordless cry and throws out those hands to him. “Shh, baby, I’m here,” he soothes, sinking down on the mattress with barely a thought for his battered belly. “Hush, hush. It was just a dream.”

“No, Daddy, it wasn’t.” Her face is pale and sticky with sweat, but her eyes burn with fevered conviction. “You have to go to the circus.”

“Honey, it’s…” He has no idea what time it is. Definitely not time to throw on a pair of boots and walk the length of Manhattan. “What’s wrong at the circus?”

“I don’t know.” She clutches him the way she used to when she was a little girl, her eyes saucer-wide. “Please, Daddy, I don't know why. Just go.”

“Helen, your father’s hurt.” Behind him, Charity wrings her hands as Caroline hovers silently in the doorway. “He can’t be running around town.”

“But something’s wrong,” Helen persists, more stubborn than the two of them put together. “I know it is.” She turns to him. “Please, Daddy. Please.”

He never could refuse those eyes. “Phineas, don’t go down there,” Charity says lowly as he dresses himself in their bedroom with ginger movements. “You’re in no shape to go running around town.”

“I’m just going to check.” Grunting, he bends to pull on one of his stockings, shrugging off her offer of assistance. “If everything’s all right, I’ll come back.”

“Phineas…”

“What do you want me to do, Charity?” He jerks on the second stocking. “It’s my daughter.”

She stands there compressing her hands against her belly, her lips drawn thinly. “I’m sorry,” he says, gentling his tone with an effort. “I don’t want to go down there either. But the way she was carrying on…Maybe it’ll put her mind at ease.”

She watches as he buttons his shirt, covering the black bruise where the joist rammed him. “Phillip has a gun,” she says suddenly, apropos of nothing, and he jerks his head up.

“He has a what?” He stares at her. “How long have you known?”

“He had it with him That Night.” They’ve all unconsciously begun to capitalize those words, the way they all call the immolation of the first circus the Fire. “He gave it to me before he came into the house. It’s a revolver.” She sips a quick breath. “He said his father gave it to him on his fourteenth birthday.”

Has he had it with him this whole time? How long has that been in his apartment keeping him company along with the whiskey and the emptiness and the silence? Was that something he should have asked him about—but how could he have known? How could he not have known? “Where does he keep it?” he asks, rising with an effort. “Did he at least tell you that?”

“I asked him if it was somewhere safe. He said it’s normally in a lockbox in his wardrobe. On the top shelf behind a hat box.”

He hobbles for the hall as fast as he can go with his damaged leg. “Why did you give it back to him?” he snaps as Charity trails in his wake.

“I had no right to take it, Phineas! It’s his gun. And if it’s not a bullet, it’ll be something else.”

She’s right, of course—and the sky is blue and grass is green—but the truth is too awful to accept. “Stay here,” he says brusquely, not meaning to be angry with her but lacking anyone else to castigate. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

“Be careful, Phineas,” she says as he opens the door, and he wants to tell her that you can’t be careful stepping out your front door.

“He’s not in the office,” WD reports grimly as he strides back to where Barnum waits in a tight knot of Oddities. Anne is hugging herself in front of her caravan, wrapped in her mother’s shawl; Lettie Lutz sits on a crate; Charles Stratton perches next to her.

“I’ll check his apartment.” Barnum waves off WD's protest. “I’ll do it myself, Wilf. I’m not dead, just sore.”

“He won’t be there,” Charles says as Barnum turns away. “He never is.”

“What do you mean, he won’t be there?” Barnum snaps, strained past the breaking point. “He told me after the doctor left that he was going home.”

“Yeah, to you that means the circus.” Charles shrugs his small shoulders. “To us, it means your place.”

“He hates that apartment, Barnum,” Lettie chimes in with that tone that implies he, like most of his sex, is slightly daft. “Why d’you think he’s always sleeping in the office or on your couch?”

“I offer him the guest room,” Barnum says defensively. “Most of the time he won’t take it.”

“Right, ‘cause then he’s a guest.” Lettie serves him a slightly more pitying version of that look. “'Cause then he’s imposing. But if he falls asleep doing paperwork, then it’s a work visit. Then he's useful.”

“But I never thought of him as a guest. I thought he knew that.”

Lettie shakes her head sadly. “Are you telling me this man fabricates excuses to fall asleep at my house so he doesn’t have to go to his empty apartment?” Barnum demands, gripping the head of his cane.

“Are we even sure this place exists?” Lettie turns to look at the other Oddities, who immediately turn and look at each other. “I mean, has anyone other than Barnum even been there?”

“Well, of course it exists,” Barnum says exasperatedly as doubtful mutters pass among the performers. “We’ve all been there.” He looks around at the sea of blank faces. “I cannot be the only one who’s ever been in that man’s apartment."

“Well, I’ve never been there,” Anne shoots back. “Anytime we wanted to…” She blushes prettily, shrugging at the knowing smirks of her friends. “My caravan sleeps two.”

“Yeah, but how much sleeping did you do?” Charles grins, and Anne ticks her hips jauntily at him.

“Hang on a minute.” Barnum holds up a hand. “You've been off and on with this man for six years and you’ve never once seen where he lives?”

“Well, he doesn’t really live there.” Her brow furrows. “I mean, he goes back now and then, but he doesn’t need to, you dig? He keeps a second set of everything in his office locker. He has a shaving kit in there and a few changes of clothes, and a backup pair of paddock boots for when the current ones wear out…”

“He told me that was where he kept his collection of Voltaire!”

“Well, yeah,” Anne says with that same tone Lettie has perfected—and every female he’s ever known, come to think of it. “The clothes wrinkle. He uses the books to press the clothes.”

“So he doesn’t actually read Voltaire,” Barnum says, throwing up his hands.

“Baby, he can quote you chapter and verse,” WD says dryly. “What he can’t do is start his day without a trouser crease you could cut your throat with.”

“But that’s crazy.” Barnum doesn’t give them time to point out the family resemblance between pots and kettles. “Why pay good money to keep an apartment he doesn’t even use?”

“Because he doesn’t want anyone to know.” Anne shrugs sadly. “He told me once he hated sleeping in an empty apartment because he had bad dreams, and sometimes he’d sleepwalk and end up in the weirdest places. Once in uni—he swears this is true—he walked to a nearby coffin maker’s shop and climbed into one of the models out back. He woke up the next morning screaming because he thought they were going to bury him alive, and the poor apprentice nearly had a heart attack.”

And he thought the circus incident reports were bizarre. “How long has this been going on?”

“He said it started when he was sixteen. I never saw him sleepwalk, but sometimes he’d toss in his sleep and mumble things.”

Without another word, Barnum turns and starts for the street. “Barnum, let me do it,” WD insists, catching his arm. “You need to sit and rest.”

“I’m fine.” He shakes him off. “If you want to help, send around to his usual watering-holes. If necessary, bribe them to tell us the moment he walks in.”

When he gets to the apartment, the front door is unlocked. “Phillip?” he calls, dropping his cane on the floor and limping through the sitting-room. “Hey, are you here?”

He doesn’t need the silence to tell him the answer. The place has an unmistakable air of neglect and abandonment, the dust still thin on the furniture but already settling in for the long haul. The air has that slightly stale, unmoved quality it acquires when no one has breathed it for a while, but he saw Phillip just hours ago, so how long has it been since the man set foot in his own home? Don’t have one, Phillip mumbled the morning Barnum carried him out of the bar, and looking around he understands the sentiment.

On the end table by Phillip’s reading chair is a copy of Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities. There’s an old letter tucked between the pages in Eric Thorne’s hand, dated March 1860:

Phillip,

I was bored in Bristol, so I picked up a copy of Dickens’ newest. The hero Sydney Carton reminds me of you. Not much of a hero, I suppose, but at least he died before the drink destroyed his looks. You won’t mind if I call you Carton from now on? If you have doubts, read the book and I’m sure you’ll concede.

Give Agnes my love.

Eric

He sets it down and continues his survey of the apartment. No ominous note adorns the kitchen table or writing-desk. No message has been scrawled on the wall in angry letters. No bloodstains or broken glass or overturned furniture mark a struggle. Even the bedsheets are clean. The apartment is simply empty, populated for the most part by perfectly mundane, impersonal minutiae common to any bachelor of any description, as if Phillip Carlyle in the specific never existed except in his imagination.

In the bedroom, he opens the wardrobe and shoves aside a monochromatic hat box to find a lockbox behind it. He grabs it and sinks down on the bed, fumbling with the clasp. It’s unlocked. Safe, my ass, he thinks, and flips up the lid.

It's empty.

He sits there for an unknown length of time with the lockbox on his lap, staring down at the musty imprint where a revolver used to be. Finally, he sets it aside and braces his elbows on his thighs, staring off at nothing. He doesn’t know what to do. He doesn’t know where to go. This is one of the biggest cities in the world. There are millions of dingy holes where a desolate man with a powerful thirst could go to drink himself to death…or drink up the courage to pull the trigger.

The former will take some doing. Somehow, he doesn’t think the latter will.

As the first hints of dawn creep into the window, he lies down on his back and picks up the pillow. It smells more of sweat than cologne; the man who lay on it slept poorly. Hugging it to his sore belly, he stares up at the featureless ceiling and wonders what horrible apparitions appeared there in the dead of night. Wills the front door to open and Phillip to walk in armed with a mouthful of sass and any explanation, any at all. Tries to paint a future for those he loves on a canvas that remains stubbornly blank.

“Wake up, slack-ass! Open this door or I’ll break it down!”

Phillip starts out of sleep, greeted by the familiar smell of the flophouse. Groaning, he lifts his pounding head to blink blearily at the other side of the bed. He’s alone, but he had a companion at some point; he feels a telltale stickiness on his thighs. God, I hope she didn’t have a disease, he thinks as he grinds the heels of his hands into his gritty eyes. And then, God, I hope I missed.

“You owe me for two nights and change,” the voice bellows through the door, and as he tries to recall the past few days—even the past few hours would do—he does a quick calculation in his aching head. Assuming he’s been here at least three nights, and assuming the night he visited his father and took his first drink in a year was the beginning of this headlong plunge, he’s been missing in action for at least eighteen days. Almost three weeks. Most of it is hazy, but he knows he hasn’t gone back to his apartment since his brief visit that first night to don some clothes, and he definitely hasn’t shown his face at Barnum’s house or the circus. They’ll think he’s on the lam; more likely, they’ll think he’s dead. And if they discover he’s alive after abandoning them for so long, they’ll probably wish he wasn’t.

The manager pounds his fist on the door. “I’ll be right there,” he calls, staggering out of bed buck naked, cringing from the bearded, haggard reflection in the cracked mirror. As he clumsily throws on his filthy garments, he casts about for his belongings. The revolver is there and so is his silver flask, but his wallet eludes him. And, to his mounting horror, so does the pocket-watch.

It’s not his only pocket-watch. It's not even his nicest one by exacting standards. But it's his favourite, and with good reason. When Barnum’s father died of consumption, he was deep in hock with their landlord from months of illness and unemployment. Knowing the debt collectors wouldn’t be far behind the undertaker, PT Barnum—all of twelve and utterly friendless—grabbed what little was left before making himself as scarce as his inheritance. The only thing left to him of any value besides his father’s top hat (pawned a few weeks later for money to buy bread) was a simple pocket-watch.

Barnum wore it everywhere, though it no longer could be counted on to tell the time and was showing its age. Then, three years ago, he set it down on his desk while changing into costume and accidentally knocked it to the floor, smashing its old bones to bits. He was sour-tempered and off his game that whole night, kicking himself from one end of the big top to the other for obliterating the last relic of his father’s existence.

Phillip forgot all about it until that Christmas when he opened a small box under the Barnum tree addressed to him. Inside, ticking and polished and gleaming, was Philo Barnum’s pocket-watch, miraculously restored. It turns out, after the accident Barnum took it to a watchmaker to have it fixed only to be told it was too old to be repaired. Having never encountered a setback he couldn’t turn to his advantage, Barnum had the undamaged parts salvaged and refitted as a new pocket-watch with modern workings. The finishing touch to this inestimable gift was an inscription on the back, a quote from Shakespeare’s The Tempest: “What’s Past is Prologue.” And below that: P.B. to P.C.

And now Phillip remembers snatches of what he’d much sooner forget, mercifully cloaked until now in a fog of liquor-induced amnesia. A week ago, fresh out of money and liquor and too ashamed to go home, he was forced to make a critical decision: pawn the revolver, the flask, or the pocket-watch.

It wasn’t much of a decision. He went into the pawnshop, trying to meet the pawnbroker’s eyes and missing by an inch or two, and offered the pocket-watch for sale. The pawnbroker appraised it in silence for a few seconds, then handed it back and quoted a painfully low figure. When Phillip balked, the pawnbroker told him it would be worth more without the inscription.

He decided to go home. Thirst was powerful, but love was more powerful still. Things had gone far enough, and nothing would induce him to fall any farther into this abyss. So he took the watch into the nearest alley and scraped the back against the brick wall until the words were obliterated, then sat down and buffed it until most of the scratches were gone. He cried as he worked, but he didn’t stop. And when he got his money, he went out and bought the strongest liquor money could buy and told himself that when it was gone, he would finally pull the trigger.

“I can pay,” he calls as the pounding is renewed, hoping this isn’t a vain statement. After another minute of searching, he’s forced to concede the inevitable. His wallet is gone and so are whatever paltry funds were left inside. He’s been robbed of the last of the watch-money by the warm body he bought to comfort himself for acquiring it. And then he starts to laugh because Judas sold his soul for thirty pieces of silver and he died penniless.

“Nothing’ll be funny if you can’t pay your bill,” the voice outside bawls. “I’m coming in sooner or later and then you’ll wish you’d been amiable.”

He was amiable enough to the prostitute who hit him up in some unknown dive, or at least she was amiable to him. Looking at himself now, he can’t imagine how she stomached it. How desperate must she have been to coax him into bed stinking of his own filth and smelling of his own despair? He tries to bring her face before his mind’s eye and can’t do it, and he’s perversely glad. In that state, she might have switched places with her dog-faced brother and he wouldn’t have known it. And then a truly horrifying thought hits him right in the gut: If Caroline had gone into that brothel, he might have hired her and not even known it.

He rushes to the basin in the corner and expels what little is left in his stomach. “That better not be on the mattress,” the voice yells as someone begins to work on the lock.

“I have money,” he calls, wiping his mouth and casting about wildly. The only egress is the window. With the door locked, that must be how the prostitute got out. Tucking the revolver and flask into his jacket, he stumbles over to the rusted frame.

He’s still trying to force the issue when the door bangs open. “I have money,” he repeats as he holds out both hands with what he hopes is a conciliatory smile. Apparently its charm is marred by two weeks’ worth of facial scruff and the bloodshot look of the perennial drunk, because two strapping bouncers grab him and slam him against the wall.

“Search him,” the manager orders, and rough hands rip aside clothing to find anything on him more valuable than his skin. He utters a cry as one of those hands seizes the flask with victorious rapacity.

“No,” he pleads as the bouncer tosses it to the manager, too empty even to slosh. “Please don’t take that.”

He’s not sure why he cares. It’s empty, and he has no way to fill it. But it’s the flask he was drinking from the night PT Barnum first spoke to him outside the theatre. It’s the last reminder of a life other than the one he’s living now.

“I think it’s the best you got, Romeo.” The manager holds it under the scant light, his unibrow rising appraisingly. “Better’n a kick in the teeth.” Pocketing it, he nods at the bouncers. “So instead of a kick in the teeth, I’m gonna be generous and give you a boot in the ass.”

He’s propelled downstairs and through a narrow hall by the two bouncers, his feet stumbling over imaginary bumps, impassive fingers printing bruises on his arms. “I can walk,” he mumbles as the manager jerks open the front door. “Hey, I can walk!”

“Yeah,” one of the bouncer growls, “but can you fly?” and then he feels a familiar and sickening sense of weightlessness as a size-fourteen boot plants itself on his rear and shoves.

He lands hard. “And don’t come back,” the manager yells as he lifts his dazed head from the paving-stones, tasting blood on his lips. “Or next time that boot really will go up your ass.”

He slams the door, sealing him out. And then, because he hasn’t pissed on himself enough for one lifetime, it starts to rain.

He goes walking.

He doesn’t think about where he’s going. Perhaps inevitably, his feet carry him to the circus. At least, they carry him to the place it used to be. For a long time he stands there in the rain, trying and failing to reconcile what he's seeing with what he knows to be true. Maybe he’s experiencing a bizarre form of the DTs—and the DTs can indeed get bizarre—but all traces of the circus have disappeared. The big top is gone, as are the lavishly painted caravans and the animal pens and the mess hall and the equipment shed where he and Anne first made love. As if his worst nightmares have come true, everything that marks the best part of his life seems to have vanished into thin air.

Well, not quite. The office is still standing—it was an old storehouse when they acquired the grounds—but when he presses his face to the dirty glass he sees that the desks and bookcases are gone, as are the couch where he's spent so many nights and the cabinet where they keep their files and the leather trunk where they stash odds and ends. A few stray crates linger in one corner, but otherwise the place is empty. But he knows the circus was here. A silk top hat lies abandoned in the dust, a size too big for his own head and garnished with a gilt band. That band is moth-eaten and filthy, but he sees it gleaming in his mind’s eye under the coloured lights, held proudly aloft for the admiration of thousands.

Disoriented and unsettled, he turns away and continues his journey, a trim, compact man eating up the miles in his well-worn paddock boots—that steady clock clock clock clock heard in all weather and at all hours—while the hidden stars frown down in puzzlement and bleary street-dwellers raise matted heads to stare.

As he crosses from one street into the next, he hears soft sobbing from a nearby alley. Unwilling but compelled, he follows the sound to its source. He finds Charity clothed in black, kneeling before a ghostly headstone amid ghostly grass, holding her face in her hands. He kneels next to her and tries to take her in his arms, but he can’t; one or the other of them is insubstantial.

His heart fracturing under the weight of her gentle grief, he forces himself to look at the headstone. Three epitaphs have been etched deep into the ebony rock:

PHINEAS TAYLOR BARNUM
July 5, 1828–April 5,1878

CAROLINE FRANCES BARNUM
June 15, 1861–April 6, 1878

UNNAMED BUT NOT UNKNOWN
Buried in the womb, loved none the less.

“Charity,” he says as she continues that soft mourning, her weeping as unchanging as the words on the headstone, "where’s Helen?”

Her spectre mourns on heedlessly. “Charity,” he urges, “where’s Helen? What happened to Helen?”

Finally, he can't bear the sound of her cyclical grief any longer. He gets up and walks away, those soft, piteous sounds trailing behind him. He looks back only once, about a stone’s throw away. She’s still there, bent over the triple grave, her face in her hands, and he knows she will be there no matter how many times he looks back.

As he crosses from that part of town into the next, he passes a rundown brothel. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees a ghostly figure lurking in the doorway, dress flauntingly cut and ragged, eyes glaring and hungry behind a curtain of matted golden hair. He passes that spectre in haste with his eyes cast down, and when the bony hand ventures toward him, he flinches from it.

His feet carry him on through the night until he comes to the field they used to call the Devil’s Fallow. But he doesn’t enter it. Instead, he walks the short distance to the bridge he and the other boys liked to call the Devil’s Tongue. On the broken stonework dance two ephemeral figures, a lithely muscular man and a sprightly young woman. He wants to call to them as they perform their nimble capers, but somehow he knows that in this time and place, they are real and he is the ghost.

As he watches, Eric Thorne dips Caroline Barnum over the deadly brink, her slender arms arcing over her head toward the water, and then he rights her as they both laugh. He takes her hand and they walk hand in hand toward the Devil’s Fallow where they will play dangerous games under the stars.

As the ill-fated lovers disappear into the rain, the ghost of a movement draws his eye back to the bridge. The form of Caroline Barnum walks back out, alone now and visibly pregnant. She stands on the brink, her white dress billowing around her, and stares across the gulf to the opposite shore. Then she steps off, swanning toward the water, and disappears without a sound.

April sixth, 1878? Or some other date? Is this out of time, or is he?

A dilapidated barn stands on the edge of the field. He walks to it, paddock boots squelching in the neglected mulch, and checks the door. The lock has long since been busted and rusted. Pushing open the groaning door, he steps inside and out of the rain.

It drums on the roof overhead as if reminding him of its presence. Stray drops dive between rotten shingles and patter on the floor to mingle with the age-old muck. The whole place is crumbling and stale and musty, reeking of decades-old manure and a luckless farmer’s sweat, and when he inhales through his nose he fancies he smells the decaying cat Jack Basker once tripped over in one of the stalls.

The lighting is poor but adequate; whatever windows aren’t broken filter the cloud-muted moonlight into a spectral glow. In the middle of the packed floor sits an old wooden table. They hauled it in for card games in bad weather along with eight or ten chairs—he forgets which—but only two now remain. They sit across from each other just as he last saw them, strangely undisturbed by twenty years of looting.

One of the chairs is stained down the leftmost legs. To the left of that is a shattered window; the window to the chair’s right is intact. He sits on the stained chair, barely feeling the damp pasting his clothes to his body, only feeling the cold sorrow in his heart. “I saw what happened to them,” he says into the dead silence. “What happened to me?”

No answer.

“Did all that happen because I died, or because I lived?”

No answer, not even from the ghosts.

Sighing, he sets his revolver on the table. When he looks up, a ghost sits in the chair across, staring at him with young eyes that will never grow old. “You and me again, Nate,” he says with a bitter grin. “It all comes back to this, doesn’t it?”

Nathaniel Gerard just stares at him. They both know that's not true. It goes further back, two weeks before this broken old barn to a field with gunsmoke in the air and blood on the ground and a scream that will pierce his darkest fugues.

“I don’t think your father’s death was an accident.” His voice is strangely flat in air that hasn’t been breathed in many years. “We used to say that, if he chose, Eric Thorne could hit East aiming West. Your father was a crack shot, but he was getting old, Nate. I'm glad you didn't see him at the last. He looked twice as old as he was.” His voice cracks. “But he loved you.”

Nathaniel Gerard says nothing. “I have only ever made this gun go off once,” Phillip goes on, staring down at the revolver with his hands clasped in his lap. “I must have spun and shot a thousand times. We used to say it was the devil’s gun and he was on a shoestring, but I don’t recall anyone laughing. Everyone else could make it fire after a few tries, but I never could. Well,” he amends, offering the ghost a crooked smile, “there was that one time.”

Without a word, Nathaniel Gerard fades into the air. Phillip sits there for a long time with the sound of rain drumming on the roof, waiting for another ghost, another sign, another voice. And then he hears the sound of heavy footsteps, graceful and sure, approaching from his right.

PT Barnum takes the chair across from him. He’s not dressed in his ringmaster regalia but in the old chore coat and trousers he wears when there’s dirty work to be done. He’s smiling, his face creased with the dear old laugh-lines, but his eyes are shrouded in sorrow.

“You’ve been walking a long time, Phil.” Leaning back in his chair, Barnum regards him with compassion and a hint of curiosity. “I don’t blame you for taking a load off. Still, you could have done it a lot more comfortably in my sitting-room.”

“I think it’s a little late for that.”

“Why?” Barnum looks at him with that almost unbearable kindness, but underneath is a hint of sternness. “You got two feet, don’t you?”

“Two feet and no pocket-watch. I hocked it for booze money. And then I lost the booze money to a hooker with sticky fingers.”

“I imagine she needed it more than you do. In any case, I don’t recall my house having an entrance fee.”

“There’s always a fee.” Phillip’s jaw works. “And somehow you always end up paying it.”

“Well, that’s the price of love. You never know how high it’s going to be until you’re playing for keeps.” Barnum crooks a sad smile. “Will you quit drinking, Phillip? For me?”

It’s a question as old as their friendship and just as wayworn. “You know I won’t,” Phillip murmurs.

Barnum nods. “I know,” he says. He nods at the revolver. “So was this the game? Russian roulette?”

“Not that night. That night there were two guns.”

“Yours was the second.”

“Yes.”

“You fired the second shot.”

“Yes.”

Barnum nods again. “Phillip, did you kill Nathaniel Gerard?” he asks, and in the face of that stern kindness, the knee-jerk assertion falters.

“Yes.” The admission is a bare breath. “I killed him. I didn’t want to, but I did, just like I killed her. I owe Eric Thorne a debt I can never repay, and now I’ve incurred one to both you and Caroline trying to repay it. And that’s why I’ll never come home. Because I’ll never be worthy.”

“Ah, Phillip,” Barnum sighs, gazing at him. “We don’t come home because we’re worthy. We come home because that’s where we belong.”

Phillip’s throat clenches. “Well, maybe I’d like to take a stab at being worthy,” he whispers.

A beat passes. “Well,” Barnum says, rising from the table, “you can’t take a stab with a bullet.”

“What does that mean?” Phillip asks as his footsteps head for the door.

“It mean you need to keep your appointment, son,” the ringmaster says from behind him, and then it’s just Phillip Carlyle and the drum of rain on the roof and the sough of wind under the eaves.

He picks up the gun and swings out the cylinder. He slots the bullet into the correct chamber and snaps the cylinder home without spinning it. Then he raises the revolver and presses the mouth of the barrel to his right temple.

“You’ve stacked the deck against me my whole life.” His voice is flat in the dead space. “Now I’m stacking it against you.” His finger tightens on the trigger. “Let’s make a bet I can’t lose. If this bullet goes through my head, I’m off the hook. If you can make it go through the window to my right, I’ll concede the game—and keep my appointment, whatever that is.” He draws a deep breath. “And I’ll never take another shot.”

Expelling the breath, he pulls the trigger.

The dry click is absurdly flat. Unable to grasp it, he relaxes his finger on the trigger and lowers the revolver, holding it away from his side as if more than the devil’s gotten into it. “What…” he begins.

The gun jumps in his hand with a deafening bang.

His cry is lost in the ensuing cacophony. As his ears ring with the report and his heart pounds in triple-time, he tries to parse what’s just happened, how a loaded and cocked gun can…well, hold its breath.

And then it hits him. He’s just witnessed that rarest of malfunctions, a hang fire. The gun temporarily jammed only to fire seconds later. A one-in-a-million accident. A bet no one would ever make.

Except that wasn’t the bet.

Slowly, he raises his eyes from the revolver. The tendons in his neck creak as his head follows his gaze. His hand is welded to the butt; the trigger is lax under his finger; the mouth of the gun points casually to his right.

Beyond the smoking barrel, rain begins to blow in through the shattered window.

“Helen.” Barnum nudges the girl dozing fitfully against his arm. Beyond the dark porch, rain curtains the secret night. “It’s time for bed.”

“No.” She nestles closer to him on the porch step, turning her face from the weak glow of the streetlights. “I want to stay with you.”

“It’s too cold, love. Not to mention too late.” Barnum nudges her again. “Go on. I’ll let you know if anything happens.”

She opens bleak eyes on the drizzly world. “I’m afraid you’ll leave,” she says. “And this time you won’t come back.”

“Oh, Helen.” His heart aching, he draws her into his arms. “I’m not going anywhere.”

“Phillip did.”

“Phillip is Not Well.” He hates that phrase and all it stands for, but he never knew how else to explain Phillip’s affliction to the two little girls who adored him. He still doesn’t. “He never means to hurt us. When the pain gets bad enough, you can’t think about anything else, that’s all.”

Helen is quiet for a moment. Then she says, “You think he’s dead, don’t you?”

She doesn’t get that frankness from him. “I don’t know,” he says as the front door opens and Charity steps out onto the porch with his warmest dressing-gown over one arm. “That’s why I’m sitting here, I guess.”

“Because he might be alive?”

“Because he might be lost.” From the corner of his eye, he sees the curtain flutter in Caroline’s bedroom window just above and beyond the porch. “And even if I don’t know where to find him, he knows where to find me.”

“Come on, Helen.” Gently, Charity urges her to her feet and toward the door. “Brush your teeth. I’ll be up in a minute to say goodnight.”

With a lifeless peck to his cheek, she floats inside like a ghost. As he braces his forearms on his knees and stares out at the empty street, Charity slips the dressing-gown over his shoulders. Then she sits on the step next to him and puts her slender arms around his neck. Their mingled breaths smoke in the air between them as she rests her head on his shoulder. The temperatures have dipped below zero for the first time this season; if tonight is any indication, it’ll be a long and bitter winter.

“It’s getting too cold for this, Phin.” Her words form shapes in the air. "If you won't come in, at least turn on one of the lamps."

"I can't see the road with them on."

“Well, I don't like you sitting out here alone in the dark and the cold. Night after night...”

“He’s out there somewhere, Chairy.” He doesn’t take his eyes off the street. “I can feel it.”

“He’s never been gone this long. Not without some kind of word.” Her next exhale trembles. “This might be it, Phin.”

“I can’t accept that.” His fingers clench into fists. “It might be true, but I can’t accept it.”

“Phineas…” She palms his bicep as if to restrain it from impulsivity. “We need to make a decision about the apartment. November’s already half gone. His landlord…”

“What if he comes back?” His voice roughens. “What if he finds someone else living there? What’s he going to think?”

“If he comes back, it won’t be to that apartment.” She squeezes his bicep fiercely. “This is his home. Maybe the first place where he really saw what home meant.”

“Yeah, home is the place where they don’t have any choice but to open the door,” he mutters, kicking viciously at a pebble on the next step down.

“No, it’s the place where they open the door because they’re glad it’s you.” She rests her head in the crook of his shoulder. “The place you don't need to earn to have.”

He thinks about that twitching curtain and wonders if he will ever truly see his daughter face-to-face again. “I don’t know how to talk to her,” he says, his words falling flat in the chilled air. “All I want to do is take her in my arms and tell her it’ll be all right. But every time I try…”

“She’s not angry at you. She’s angry at him.” With a shock, he realizes Charity is just as furious with Eric Thorne as he is, maybe more. Who knows what fires burn unextinguished in a mother’s heart? “She just doesn’t know it yet.”

“It was a mistake to let Phillip propose.” He shakes his head. “I just wanted to give her another option. More stability…maybe even another shot at a career down the road…”

“I think it would have been a mistake for her to go through with it. But that doesn’t mean it was a mistake to offer.” She kisses his cheek. “One day, she’ll know that too.”

She stands to go inside. “Put an extra blanket on to warm, will you, Chairy?” he asks over his shoulder as she crosses the porch. “It’s cold tonight.”

With a sad smile, she goes inside and shuts the door.

As the lights in the house go out one by one, he begins to pace the porch. He’s wound as tight as a watch-spring, labouring under a growing sense of imminence, sensing beyond reason or explanation a contest fought far from help in some lonely place. And as the hours cross the threshold from late night into early morning, dread as ponderous as a slow-moving breaker rolls over him.

He bows under it, leaning over the railing, gripping the painted wood with both hands. His knuckles pop out like the knots on an old oak; the skin is taut and blanched. He can’t move or speak. He can barely breathe. All he can do is silently beg God over and over for another chance, just one more chance, just one more shot at taking whatever bullet is headed their way.

And then, with an abruptness that shocks him, the breaker passes over.

He comes up for air, gasping at the sudden weightlessness. He sags against the railing, shaking as if he’s just covered ten miles at a sprint. The rain is unchanged and so is the darkness, but he senses something has been decided—for better or for worse.

Seized by an impulse—and he hasn’t gotten where he is by ignoring those—he goes into the house. He collects a couple of items from his study and the sitting-room, then ascends to the second floor. He finds Caroline asleep in her bed, curled around the slight round of her belly as if to protect its secrets. One hand lies under her cheek; the other rests on the second pillow. Moved, he bends and ghosts a kiss over her burnished hair, careful not to jostle her. Her only acknowledgment is a little sigh on her next exhalation. “I’ll bring it back,” he whispers as he lifts the wishing-machine from her bedside table. “I promise.”

On the porch, he gets to work. The small taper he replaces with the thicker stub from Charity’s sewing basket, then cuts a wide strip of gold gauze from his costume repair kit. He pastes it over the outside of the cup, fastidiously smoothing down the edges. That done, he unbends a wire hanger and works it into a makeshift pannier. Placing the wishing-machine in its new cradle, he lights the candle and slots the cup into place.

If he can't see Phillip, maybe Phillip will see him.

He steps up on the railing and hooks the modified wire hanger over the eaves. It sways lightly in the wind but doesn’t fall, and he lets it go. The gauze protects the flame from the rain and gives the light a soft golden cast. Gold, bright and warm and splendid, token of all the good things home has to offer. A man worn and wearied and wasted by a rough road won’t be able to resist a light like that. Just the sight of it will warm his cold bones and lift his sunken soul. He followed such a light once, if only in his heart.

Holding his breath, he lays his finger on the side of the pencil cup and spins it.

The crenelated cup pirouettes, patterns whirling dizzily over the porch beams and the dreamy topography of his face. “Come, Josephine, in my wishing-machine,” he sings softly, then laughs damply, dashing the moisture from his cheeks with his palms. What an awful, wonderful night that was—losing his job and forgetting his daughter’s birthday and crafting her a piece of worthless junk from the odds and ends in his battered briefcase. And then spinning the cup and astonishing himself and everyone around him with the beauty hidden in broken bits, marvelling at the potential for the extraordinary on the canvas of threadbare wash on a tenement roof.

Realizing that, if he played his cards right, he could make others see it too.

Turning his eyes from that tantalizing light, he refocuses his attention on the street, standing tall on the porch railing, heedless of the cold rain slicking his hair and dampening his clothes. As the cup winds down, he reaches up without looking and spins it, and again, and again, and again.

And as he watches and waits and wishes, a figure emerges from the gloom.

It could be an afterimage from staring too long at the light. So he closes his eyes and counts to five, and when he opens them the figure is still there. It walks toward him slowly, so slowly that it must be weary to the point of death, shoulders slumped and steps dragging. But he could never mistake that stride, broken as it is. He could never mistake those boots. He knows that man.

“Phillip?” he calls, and the figure lifts its weary head and looks at him.

He doesn’t wait. He hops down from the railing, ignoring the twinge in his healing right leg as he lands. He doesn’t bother opening the little cast-iron gate. He swivels over it and hits the pavement on the other side, already in full stride.

His dressing-gown flaps behind him in the wind. His slippers slow his progress, so he flips out of them without pausing, splashing through cold puddles in his bare feet. Down the road, the figure stops in the middle of the deserted Gramercy street, looking at him out of a face beard-scruffy and puffed-eyed and exhaustion-pinched. He wears the same expression he did That Night in Barnum’s front hall, as if he believes his very presence will provoke a blow…but he’s not running.

He's walking. Home.

“I saw the light.” His voice is barely a croak as Barnum comes on at full tilt. “I thought that, maybe…”

Staggering the last few strides, Barnum grabs him and crushes him to his chest. They stand like that for a long time while the rain arrows around them and their exhalations fog the air and the chill dissipates between them.

“I’m sorry.” Phillip’s breaths are wonderfully warm against his neck, not the breaths of a ghost but of a living man. “I'm so sorry. I haven’t been the man I should be.”

“None of us are.” He’s afraid to let go. So he holds on. “I’m just glad you’re home.”

A sigh shudders against his neck. “How close was it?” Barnum whispers against his greasy hair.

“Seconds.” Phillip grips him tighter. “Maybe less.”

“God Almighty.” It’s more than half a prayer. “Phillip…”

“Don’t ask me that.” Phillip’s hands fist in the back of his dressing-gown. “I’m sorry. Things will be different from now on.”

Something in his voice is different—filled with a becoming resolve that elevates him. Pulling back, Barnum palms Phillip’s scruffy chin to lift it to the light. Haggard bruises cup sleep-deprived eyes, bloodshot above hollow cheeks; his clothes stink of booze and filth, and every inch of him is rough and ragged. But his eyes glow with a light that comes from more than the wishing-machine. He’s a dead man walking, and yet those eyes have never looked so alive.

“Phillip, what happened to you?” He releases his chin as the rain soaks them both to the bone. “Where did you go?”

“I don’t know exactly.” Phillip’s brows contract in the old familiar perplexed way. “A lot of it is a blank.”

“Did anyone hurt you?” He hasn’t missed the traces of blood around Phillip's mouth. “Do you owe anyone anything?”

“Not anymore.” A cramp of shame briefly contorts his partner's face. “A hooker took my wallet. I owed for the room, so they took my flask.”

“Well, that’s no great loss.” Restraining the urge to demand how, exactly, they went about taking it, Barnum strips off his dressing-gown. “Come inside,” he orders. “Your room’s all made up. And tomorrow we’ll get you moved out of that apartment and into my third floor.”

“I don’t expect that,” Phillip says quietly as Barnum drapes the dressing-gown over his shoulders. “It makes sense to pool our resources, but I don’t deserve to live under the same roof as your family.”

“I didn’t deserve it either.” Barnum tugs the dressing-gown closed. “It wouldn’t be half as good if we did.”

“PT…” Phillip balks as Barnum tries to turn him toward the house. “Before we go in, I have something to tell you.”

Barnum braces himself for some unspeakable confession. Burglary, murder, God knows what.

“I lost the pocket-watch.” Phillip meets his eyes with admirable resolve. “The one that belonged to your father. I…” He draws a deep breath, tears mingling with rainwater. “I sanded down the inscription and hocked it to buy booze. I’m so sorry, PT. It’s gone.”

“Oh, Phillip.” Uttering a hoarse laugh, Barnum takes Phillip’s head and presses their foreheads together. “I got watches,” he murmurs. “I got watches out the wazoo.”

“I know, but this one belonged to your father.”

“Yes, and that made it valuable to me. But that’s not what made it valuable to you.” His grip tightens. “And let me tell you something, Phil: there’s a lot more where that came from.”

A smile transforms Phillip’s face, and there’s something about it, but what? Straightening and slinging an arm around his shoulders, Barnum half-drags him to the house. “Charity, girls,” he bellows as he throws open his front door, prompting cries of surprise from upstairs, "look who came home!”

“You’re a good man, Phineas.” Curled in her armchair by the bedroom window, Charity smiles tiredly up at him. “I hope you know that.”

“It’s not over.” He glances at the window where hints of dawn lighten the frame. It always takes him by surprise, somehow. “Not by half.”

“One victory at a time,” she says with that indefatigable calm that’s carried them through a thousand storms. “I’ve said this before,” she adds as he turns away, “but for what it’s worth, I’m glad you came home.”

His throat tightens. Bending, he lifts her hand to his lips and kisses it. “I’m glad you let me,” he says quietly. “Without you, I wouldn’t have had anything to come back to.”

She squeezes his hand, sharing one of those depthless looks that exist between people who have walked the blind darkness hand in hand.

Outside the guest room, he finds Caroline standing in the shadows. They cloak her like the weeds of a forgotten mourner, bowing her head under an unseen weight. He grieves to see her struggle to lift her head and show her face, even to those who love her, but he doesn’t know how to tell her she has nothing to hide. Not when the world wants nothing more than to tell her she does.

“Is he still awake?” he asks, and she startles, showing a flash of whiskey eyes in a stray stripe of light.

“I don’t know.” Her voice is oddly abstract, as if her spirit is speaking from somewhere far away. “I think he might be writing.”

“All right.” He hesitates, then edges past her, wanting to take her in his arms, fearing she’ll leave him with more claw-marks on his soul. “You should go back to bed,” he says instead. “The doctor’s coming for another checkup tomorrow, and you need your rest.”

She ghosts off toward her room and he thinks, Two out of three—will I ever get it right, or will I be forever chasing after one only to lose sight of another?

The door is open. Phillip is propped up in bed with two pillows at his back, drowned in warm blankets, a ledger propped on his tented knees. He’s dressed in one of Barnum’s nightshirts, hilariously big on him but worlds better than the filthy garments Charity promptly tossed in the stove. At one hip is a stack of financial records filched from Barnum’s study; at the other is Helen, curled against his side like a dog.

At the sound of his footsteps, Phillip glances up. “Hey,” he says, sparing him a quick smile. “I’m just roughing out the estimates for the next six months. I figure if we pool our resources and recover our revenue by two to four percent, we can squeak by with minimal losses.”

“That’s great, but just so you know, I don’t expect you to solve our financial woes in the first three hours.” Leaning against the doorframe, Barnum watches with a smile as Helen snorts in her sleep and burrows closer. “Warmer?” he quips, pocketing his hands.

“My hot-water bottle is functioning as intended, thank you.” Phillip passes a gentle hand over Helen’s hair as he glances at an open record across his buried feet. “In related news, she’s insisted I prioritize my morning shave. Apparently facial hair makes me look—and I quote—scuzzy.”

Charity’s word was piratical. “The next few months could be rough,” Barnum says quietly as Phillip traces a line with one chipped nail. “Maybe dangerous.”

“I know.” Phillip’s voice is calm as he makes an amendment in the ledger. “I’ll be here.”

“I know, but…”

“I’ll be here.” He raises his head, and that new resolution gleams in his eyes. “And I’ll be sober.”

He wants to believe that. Desperately. And the better part of him does, but there have been so many promises over so many years that it’s hard. Still, something in those eyes…

“Get some sleep,” he says, pushing himself off the doorframe. “Tomorrow’s moving day and you have a circus full of people waiting to wring your neck.”

Phillip breaks into a wayworn version of his grin. “And you’ll be there to demonstrate the proper technique,” he retorts, and as Barnum chuckles, he tries one more time to pinpoint the difference—nothing astonishing, nothing obvious, but something.

And then it hits him like a shock: he can see the first real traces of crows-feet at the corners of Phillip’s eyes.

“Get some sleep,” he repeats, and as those creases deepen with a smile, a delightful melancholy warms him. It suits him, he thinks as he heads back down the hall. He’s going to be a damn fine-looking gentleman when he’s old.

Chapter Text

Christmas that year is a grey, joyless affair. PT Barnum tries to be jolly—it’s his duty—but it’s hard to coax smiles from others when his own seem to have gone south for the winter. To make things worse, the infamous anti-vice activist Anthony Comstock takes to the press in sermonic style, railing about the Virgin Mary as a counterpoint to the Defiant Harlot, contrasting the Seed of God with the Seed of Satan. Predictably, he entirely neglects to mention the Contemptible Bastard who planted it.

And then even the dimmed splendour of Christmas fades and it’s just winter again, the temperature dropping and the wind rising as the bitter New Year approaches, its promise already broken. Caroline is five months pregnant, and although her belly has filled out and her face has softened, there seems somehow to be less of her. Expelled from school, she works on her lessons with Charity and Phillip and labours over items for the baby, but she has yet to show her face to any of the Oddities except Anne, and as for Barnum…he can’t remember the last time she looked him in the eye.

And so they come to New Year’s Eve.

It is the last day of the last year of Caroline’s childhood, the last year Barnum will spend entirely in the first half of his life’s centenary, the last year he’ll recall a time the name Eric Thorne mercifully meant nothing to him. And on this final night of the year, with the wind beating its vindictive fists against the sides of the house and its offspring raising hellish howls in the flue, Anne Wheeler arrives on their doorstep.

“You shouldn’t have come, Anne.” As she puffs warmth into her hands, Barnum fusses her out of her snow-dusted outer layers. Next to him, Charity shakes out her scarf as Helen nearly caves in her ribs with a fierce hug. “It’s blowing a gale.”

“It’s not that bad.” Kissing the top of Helen’s head, Anne glances around for Caroline. Nowhere to be seen, as usual. “We all wanted to wish you a Happy New Year,” she says, turning back to the Barnums. She hesitates, a chorus of one, then throws out her arms theatrically. “Happy New Year,” she shrugs a bit sheepishly.

“That’s lovely, Anne.” As soon as Helen detaches herself, Charity embraces her. She looks tired, poor woman, but less so than before Phillip moved in. To his credit, he's been as good as his word...so far. “I’m so sorry,” she adds in a lower voice. “Normally we’d have you all over, but…”

“We understand. She's not ready.” Squeezing Charity’s arm, Anne dips her head at the stairs. “Is Phillip home?”

That phrase, at least, puts some of the old glow back into Barnum’s eyes. “He’s working on the shareholder release for Jack Basker,” he says, rolling his eyes. “Don’t tell him I know. He thinks he’s sparing me.”

“Oh, B,” Anne sighs.

“Basker’s good people. He stuck with it as long as he could. Longer than most would dare.” Barnum's brow furrows dangerously. “The way investors are jumping ship, you’d think she was growing a plague in her belly instead of a baby.”

“Well, tell her we all miss her like crazy. Lettie’s champing at the bit to mother-hen her, and WD’s on permanent standby as an honour guard.” As she ascends the stairs, she leans over the banister. “Take heed, girl,” she says to Helen with mock-sternness. “Next Saturday. Mess hall. You, me, Lettie, and Nora. We’re gonna show you a trick with pomade and seaweed that’ll make you look like you grew gold instead of hair.”

It’s a small kindness, one of a thousand already past, but Helen’s face lights up like it’s a second chance at Christmas Day. “Really?” she asks with a hint of her old impishness, clasping both hands on the banister between Anne’s. “What’s the trick?”

“You don’t show, you don’t know.” Winking at Charity, who mouths her gratitude, Anne leaves Helen importuning for details in vain.

At the third-floor landing, she knocks on the half-open door. “PT?” Phillip’s voice asks from inside—slightly panicked, bless his soul.

“Naw, it’s me.” She’s dying to push the door open and get her first full look at his new home, but she restrains herself. He’s generous of heart, but he guards his secrets. “Besides, he already knows.”

A low curse redraws her lips in a smile. “Come in,” he sighs a moment later, and she steps inside as casually as she can. “I didn’t think you’d make it out tonight,” he says as he turns away from his desk, laying down his fountain pen with one of his lovely slow smiles. “It’s nice to be wrong.”

“I wouldn’t know,” she shoots back, and he laughs. She turns in a slow circle, admiring the sprawl of undivided floor, the massive windows covering the front and back walls, the well-lit study with the rich mahogany bookshelves adjoining a cozy sitting-room with its own fireplace. “My Lord," she says with unfeigned admiration, "it looks like a proper gentleman’s flat. You've done a lot in a month.”

“Well, if there’s one thing PT and Charity Barnum can’t stand, it’s letting a place go to pieces, even if it wasn't being used.” She can feel his piercing eyes on her as she crosses the sedate rugs to marvel at his makeshift bedroom and toilet area, partitioned off with dressing-room screens. “Turns out, my entire life fits very neatly in their attic.”

“Some attic,” she scoffs, admiring the tasteful arrangement of pastels and circus photographs on her return journey. She glances over her shoulder. “Sleeping better?”

“Well, I haven’t sleepwalked yet.” He stands, and she notes with pleasure his trim, clean appearance. “I’m still having nightmares, but at least when I wake up…” He gestures around the room, replete with evidence of the love and admiration of many, returned in abundance by its tenant.

“I’m happy for you.” Suddenly shy, she cups her elbows with her hands. “You’ve found your place.”

He gazes at her with the old sadness lurking in his cornflower eyes, and a wave of longing sweeps over her with abrupt ferocity. “Wish I could say I was here to gab,” she segues, taking a step back as if that will rescue her from the riptide. “But I'm actually here on business.”

“Let me guess.” He reaches down to cap his fountain pen. “I'm wanted at the circus. O’Malley doesn’t want to be responsible if the animal pens blow in during the storm.”

“You know how he is.” She flirts a smile at him. “Big ol’ pain in the ass.”

He chuckles. “You really have done well, Phillip,” she observes, going to the big bay window overlooking the street. Tiny coronas of light mark where the streetlights struggle to hold their ground against the wind-whipped snow; shadows dance around them like faceless marionettes. “And you’re a big help to them. I can see that.”

“It’s the least I can do.” His voice approaches from behind, and she shivers involuntarily. “Helen’s come out of herself a little, but Caroline…” He draws a quick breath like a man in pain. “I don’t know what to do with Caroline.”

“No one does, baby,” she says softly. His footsteps come closer, for once neither sharp nor hurried, and she closes her eyes. Wishes for the impossible. “You tried,” she starts, “you tried,” she starts again, and then she loses her train of thought as his presence merges with hers.

His next breath warms the nape of her neck. “Here,” he murmurs, and she exhales with a shudder, fogging the glass. His hands brush her shoulders and she almost turns and throws herself into his arms, but he’s only layering her with a blanket from the couch. “You’re shivering.”

“Yes,” she gasps, grabbing his hand before it can leave her. “Phillip, yes. I am.”

For a moment they stand there, frozen hand-in-hand, staring out together at the blank night. Then his lips descend to touch her neck, questing tentatively in search of permission, and she leans into him with a groan that’s half a sigh. “Anne,” he whispers, palming her waist with one hand as his kisses firm, and ah, he smells lovely, no traces of liquor or smoke, nothing but cologne and soap and his own sweet scent. “Anne...”

She turns into him, winding her arms around his neck. “I want to,” she half-sobs as he leans in, burying his face in the crook of her shoulder. “But I’m afraid. I'm sorry. I can't help it.”

“I'm afraid too.” His voice is muffled, but the language of his body is plain. “I’ve made so many mistakes. I don’t want to make any more. With you above all others.”

She tracks her hands through his thick waves, undoing them, inhaling his scent as he breathes against her skin. “Can you always be this man?” she whispers. “I’ll live in any cage if I can live there with you.”

“Yes.” He stays where he is—not leaning in, not pulling away. Just staying. “But Anne…” He pauses for so long that she thinks he’s forgotten the words. And then he says, “I have an appointment. And I have to keep it.”

It’s just about the last thing she expected him to say. “An appointment?” she echoes, blinking over his shoulder. “What kind of appointment?”

“I don’t know.” Pulling back a little, he traces the contours of her face with work-roughened fingers. “But I think…I think I might not be here after it's over.”

She doesn’t know what to say to that. It sounds ominous, but he’s not speaking the way he used to when he would contemplate taking a drink or would ponder the dark possibilities for destruction that terrified her every single moment he was missing. She’s not sure what this new gravitas portends. The only thing she knows is that it raises him far higher than it could ever level him.

Before she can voice any of that, he straightens fully and smiles, and he’s the old Phillip again, except for that new gravity. “I’ll go with you back to the circus,” he says, all chivalry and respectful distance, and her body cries out for him. “Let’s not make O’Malley worry himself to an early grave.”

As midnight approaches, after Phillip has left for the circus with Anne and her mother and Helen have fallen asleep, Caroline steals downstairs to the lighted study.

It’s probably the only place in the house where Phillip Carlyle has more privileges than PT Barnum’s own daughters. She used to resent that. She used to resent being treated like a…well, like a girl. Then Phillip sat her down and explained in his calm, tactful way that he already spends half his time just trying to keep her father on task, and if the Circus King knew his beloved daughters might burst in at any moment, that would be the end of business.

She knows that’s true. She also knows that, as much as they joke around and mouth off, they actually do accomplish a great deal. But there’s a comfortable, somewhat grumpy, slightly frumpy quality to their relationship that she envies. That elusive quality seems to make everything easier between them, even their arguments, even their disappointments great and small. And yet, strange as it seems now, she always assumed that she would never be the one to break her father’s heart.

She slips inside, soft on slippered feet, expecting him to be working at his desk as he so often is. But he’s not. He’s fallen asleep on the couch in his clothes the way her mother used to when she’d wait up for him, his head crooked against a cushion, a scrap of paper in one hand. His face looks old by candlelight—cracked and seamed like worn leather—but it’s a face that has come to terms with itself, and the terms are decent. It frets and frolics by day, but sheer exhaustion gentles it, and its repose confers a strange dignity. A strange beauty.

On closer inspection, she sees that he’s holding her mother’s record of their household expenses. Her ledgers are meticulous, a diligence her father has made no secret of admiring, but this year a few unusual expenditures swell the ranks. Crib. Swaddling blankets. Flannel for diapers. Straight pins for securing them. Powered vegetable sulfur for rash. Glass bottles, though her mother is gently encouraging her to breastfeed. It’s all so terrifying...and yet, she chose this. She had a chance to choose differently, and she chose this, and that means she has unchosen other things.

In a flash so exquisite it feels like pain, she understands that creating a baby is not the romantic act of magic she once thought it was. It’s not an act of will. It’s not an act of flesh. It’s somewhere in the middle of all three, in that unknown space within her deeper even than Eric Thorne could reach. The stranger inside her remains a mystery, but lately she finds herself bending toward him or her—mentally, soulfully—longing to inquire of a mind and soul present but nascent. How strange it is to find herself turning more and more frequently away from the image of the one she has loved to the unknown image of the one she will love…to find her love subtly shifting lower and higher.

Shifting into centre, displacing all her former idols.

She sits next to her father on the couch, careful not to jostle him. Wisping her fingertips over his lined brow—there’s a fresh bruise there from yet another confrontation—she thinks about the endless hours and days and years that have marked him so deeply, and how many of those hours and days and years have been spent worrying about her and her sister and her mother and all their manifold worries. And suddenly doubt stirs in her like the first kick of an unborn baby. All that her father has said about Eric Thorne…all that her mother and Phillip and everyone else has said…might some part of it not be justified? Could Eric Thorne’s unlined brow and unsilvered hair and creaseless eyes be treacherous and her father’s weathered ones be true? Could it be that she’s bought into a false friend’s lies only to discover her fierce family’s loyalty? Could it be that she's unchosen them to choose him…and would her father still be waiting for her on the porch if she chose differently, wishing-machine ablaze and gaze fixed on the road?

Could it be that he was waiting there all along?

She gets up, paces to the study door, paces back. She doesn’t know it, but the ghost of her father’s worry-crease has appeared between her eyes. The dilemma is so sharp it pierces her like a sword. She’s written her former lover almost every day, begging for protection, begging for answers, begging for love, and she’s received nothing, not even a rejection. But what if she showed up on his doorstep? What would happen then? If she turned up in person—if she tested her brash assertions that her father, not Eric Thorne, stands between her and her happily-ever-after—what would Eric Thorne do? If she forced his hand, would it be a kindly one…or would it strike down her faith?

There’s only one way to find out. And she must. One way or another, she must look her lover in the face, look deep into the eyes that have looked into hers, and see if any of her own love looks back.

And if not...if not...

She kneels next to the couch with some difficulty—this gradual loss of her grace is agonizing—and places one hand over her father's heart. “Sleep, Daddy,” she whispers, kissing that worn brow, willing him better dreams than the ones she has shattered. “I’ll be back soon." She hesitates, then adds haltingly, "I'm sorry I broke the necklace."

He sighs and turns his face toward her. Before she can change her mind, before she can succumb to the desire to lay her head on her daddy's chest and let his well-tested strength carry her, she gets up and leaves his side.

As she emerges into the rising wind bundled to the eyes, she's barely aware of the clock cooing midnight.