The figure shifted, raised his eyes. He didn’t lower his scarf. The smith glimpsed two burning lights, like little coals, reflecting the fires of the forge.
“I’m looking for the Beecher and Fox Circus,” he whispered.
“Ah, circus folk,” the smith said, swallowing. “I allowed you for a visitor in these parts. Got separated, did you? Your folk is up in Remington. Two miles west of here.”
“Remington,” whispered the stranger.
“You can’t miss it, friend. You’re not on foot, are you?”
The stranger turned his face and looked at the shod horses whickering in their stalls and then he looked back at the smith and started to remove his black gloves, finger by finger.
“No,” he said softly.
Stepping soundlessly forward as he spoke, shutting the door behind him.
* * *
In the days after Marlowe’s leaving, Brynt just slept, and ate, and worked. Emptily, just like there was nothing else in a life. Twice a night she’d loom in the footlights of Fox’s sideshow tent, half-undressed, her silver hair braided down her back, her tattoos exposed in the candle fire, while ugly faces leered all around. Then she’d pull up the straps of her dress, stalk powerfully off the stage. A deep sadness was in her, like a drug, and it would not leave her.
The Dream, though, that had left her. It had gone away with Marlowe, in that old cart driven by the hired detective, that grim woman with the dark eyes and oilskin coat, collar rolled up against the cold, and Brynt almost missed it now, the Dream that is, never mind the man in the black cloak, his face lost to darkness, his long white fingers. Almost missed it, because it was one of those things that reminded you what you’d had, what you’d been afraid of losing all along.
The day’s light was already fading. She was working in the menagerie tent, shoveling out the stalls, hauling in gray buckets of washwater. The muleteer hunched at his tack bench with a mallet and punch, fixing the traces, sullen, toothless as old shoe leather. He’d lived half a life in the gutters of cities Brynt couldn’t even pronounce, in Argentina, in Bolivia, and there was a clarity to his meanness that made his presence bearable. The stalls reeked still of the previous night’s smoke. The muleteer’s overalls sagged loosely as he worked, cussing a blue streak, a music just under his breath. Not at anything in particular, not at anyone, just cussing almost for the sake of it, as if it were a thing needing its own attentiveness, like prayer, or poetry. Goddamnmotherfuckingsonofawhore, he blurted. And Brynt, tired, sad, nodded in time to his outbursts.
Marlowe never said a whisper, that last morning. Not one word. She’d walked beside him, not touching, all the way out to the cart where it sat in the half-light of the early field, the wet grass at their knees, her palm hovering at the back of the kid’s neck protectively, her shawl wrapped at his shoulders, hoping he would say something, anything, even if it was just to say how damn mad he was about it all. But his little face just stared down at his shoes the whole way. He’d looked so small. It was almost the worst part of it, for Brynt, the way he said nothing, not even when she kneeled in the cold mud and held him and said goodbye, while the detective threw his little trunk up in the back of the cart and stood waiting, pulling her gloves off with her teeth, running her red hands over the mare in the chill. Then Marlowe climbed up, the detective clicked the reins, and the cart creaked bumpily out over the wet field onto the old road that led east, into the rising sun.
She tried to imagine Marlowe happy in that woman’s company, Marlowe laughing at some foolishness she’d muttered, maybe folding himself sleepily into her coat at a fire in a roadside ditch, but she couldn’t imagine it, and she crushed her eyes shut in despair. Eight years, his family had hunted him. The love in that gesture, surely that meant something?
If nothing else, she thought, at least he was safe.
Safe. She felt something then, a web of pain flaring in her abdomen, in her ribs, sudden and precipitous, so that she straightened and put a hand to her gut and stood gasping, staring around her. She didn’t know what was wrong with her. It was like she couldn’t breathe for a moment. And then the feeling was passing, or the worst of it at least, leaving her dazed with that same heaviness she’d been feeling ever since Marlowe had left, or been taken, rather: a heaviness that was three parts lonely and one part anger, and the anger in it was aimed squarely at herself. She shouldn’t have let the boy go, not alone. Not without her.
Mr. Beecher lifted aside the flap of the tent with his silver cane, gingerly, as if he didn’t want to dirty his fine clothes, never mind that he lived and traveled with a circus outfit in and out of the shittiest towns in the Midwest.