“That’s right.”
“But it isn’t always, is it? A choice, I mean. You can’t always choose.”
It was like he’d been thinking about something else, something darker, more disturbing, and she’d wondered all at once if it was his mother, if it was Eliza he was thinking about.
“Sometimes we don’t get to choose,” she’d said gently. “That’s true.”
“Yeah,” he’d said.
She’d looked at him then, really looked at him. The way he was regarding his own gray face in the mirror, biting his lip, the shock of black hair falling over his forehead. And she’d put down her paint and drawn him in close.
“Oh, honey,” she’d said, like she often did, whenever she didn’t know what else to say.
* * *
Now she was holding her skirts in one hand and picking her way through the morning muck and guylines, seeking Mr. Beecher’s office. Marlowe half ran alongside her to keep up.
Beecher was the managing partner and paymaster. Brynt had decided in the night that she would have to talk to him anyhow, that it was time, but then in the morning, right after breakfast, a girl had knocked at their wagon with word that she and the boy were wanted at Mr. Beecher’s office, right away, if you please. Brynt did not go in for coincidences, she believed there was a shape to the world and to its happenings, whether she could see it or not, and she’d thought of that night’s dream and of the feeling that was in her still and she’d frowned and reached for her hat.
Everywhere reeked of wet horses and hay. There were trash and playbills trampled in the mud. Figures squatted on the steps of the traveling wagons, unshaven, turning coffee in tin cups. These were those whose gifts did not belong in the world. Geeks and clowns, palm readers and fire-eaters. They followed her with dark eyes. She and Marlowe had worked the sideshow stages here for six weeks now and still they were outsiders, strangers, keeping to themselves mostly, but Brynt didn’t mind, preferred it in fact. She had been among such people all her life and knew they were no worse than any others, no more like her than anyone, never mind their own strangeness. People were people, and mostly that meant they took what they could, whenever they could.
She had always been different, all her life.
“You’re like a left foot,” her uncle used to say. That was when she was just a girl, back in San Francisco, living those days in the apartment house he superintended. Her uncle had been a pugilist, famous in some circles, winning fight after fight until one night he didn’t, and then beginning the long slow slide into headaches, and fists so swollen they couldn’t close right, and a slurring speech. He’d raised her to fight and by the age of ten she would already hunt the biggest boy in any street and sometimes it seemed fighting was all she’d ever known. She’d loved him though, her uncle, loved his big gentle ways, how he never made her feel anything but normal, despite her size and her great strength. It surprised her sometimes to think about her life, how much of the world she had seen, meeting the reverend in San Francisco in the year after her uncle died, going with him south to Mexico. That was where she first inked her skin. Later she and the reverend sailed for England, traveled Spain, returned to England. Now that she was back in America she understood that no place was her own.
She trudged brooding across the fairground, Marlowe leaping and skipping across the mud. A strangeness was in her heart. A hammer rang out in the cold air, twice, then twice again, like a warning. An ancient clown in shirtsleeves raised his face from a water barrel, razor open in his hand. He nodded gravely at them as they passed. Away at a fence line a woman wearing a frock coat over a pair of long underwear was hauling a pail of water. Out beyond loomed a reef of cloud dark against a darker sky.
Whatever it was Mr. Beecher wanted, she could not guess. But she was herself thinking that she and Marlowe had been working the sideshow over a month now, and that was too long by half, and it was time to be moving on.
* * *
There were three of them. They were seated around Beecher’s desk in the mud-spattered tent he called his office and they all turned as one when she entered. She had to dip her head because of the low entrance and she reached out a hand and felt Marlowe take two of her fingers in his little fist. One of them was a woman, dressed in a blue velvet dress, a wide-brimmed hat placed delicately on her yellow curls so that her eyes were in shadow. Under the hem of her skirt Brynt glimpsed mud-spattered boots. As her eyes adjusted, she saw the woman’s nose had been broken long ago and set crookedly and her eyes were full of flint so that Brynt understood she was neither delicate nor refined. She had an air of ferocity and suspicion that Brynt, in other circumstances, might have been drawn to.