But this girl! Never mind her claim that she was a real mermaid—a thing Barnum could hardly countenance—she looked like a real mermaid. All that black hair flowing everywhere and her eyes . . . Barnum had never seen eyes like that.
He knew now why there were so many rumors about her. And of course, the woman seemed to believe it herself. She was addled, no doubt, but her belief would help sell the mermaid notion to the public.
He’d have to keep her contact with newspapermen at a minimum, at least at first. The girl was a little too honest. Those remarks about the “dead things” in the museum wouldn’t do. Levi could do all the talking for the time being. He was good at that.
Barnum would think up a spectacular costume for her. It would be tricky, because as Levi said there were always the church ladies to consider, and church ladies would not approve of a bare-chested nymph frolicking in the water.
Barnum remembered those grim-faced women at the Congregational Church in Bethel, and Sundays spent on hard wooden pews being told that man was by nature depraved, that God had selected a chosen few to enter heaven and that everyone else was destined for hell no matter what they did in life.
He’d decided pretty young that if it didn’t matter what he did, he might as well have fun. As a showman, he downright relied on humankind’s essentially depraved nature.
Barnum hoped that the girl—Amelia, her name was—wouldn’t object to the type of costume he wanted. Which reminded him that he would have to get her to eat more. She was as thin as a washboard. Men liked to see a nice, round, healthy-looking woman—round in all the right places, that is. He’d speak to Charity about it, make sure his wife knew the girl was to eat and to have Cook make plenty of fattening foods.
Charity hadn’t liked the notion of the woman staying with them in their apartment, but Barnum had stood firm. It was his apartment and his museum, and he wouldn’t have his mermaid walking to and from a boardinghouse like some common serving maid.
At least he wouldn’t have her doing that until she’d made her debut to the world. The first glimpse anyone would have of that girl would be onstage in the museum.
After that, any public appearances (including walking to and from appropriate lodgings) would be in the interests of publicity.
Barnum frowned, thinking of the plain wool dress and ugly shoes Amelia wore. He’d have to buy her a new wardrobe. She needed both fashionable day wear and some exotic and glamorous things, something that would befit a mermaid.
While he was at it, he’d have to come up with a better name for her. “Amelia Douglas from the Middle of Nowhere, Maine” didn’t have a ring to it. Everyone knew mermaids were from warm places, anyhow, not some ice-encrusted northern town.
The Caribbean Mermaid? The Bermuda Mermaid? No. He’d think of something, though. His mermaid was going to be a wonder such that the world had never seen.
There were other problems to consider. He’d need a tank big enough to show the girl—though she was skinny, she wasn’t the size of a goldfish, and she would need room to swim around. That would cost a fair bit; he’d have to find someone to make a tank especially for him.
Then there was the trick of showing the mermaid’s “change.” There would have to be some illusion involved there. No one, not even the most gullible audience members, would buy that the girl was a mermaid if they didn’t see her walking on two legs first.
He knew a bit about magician’s illusions. There had been a magician in Barnum’s Grand Scientific and Musical Theater traveling show. He had seen Joe Pentland practicing his tricks plenty of times, and Barnum knew about things like holes in the floor to pass new objects into a hat or the sleight of hand that disguised the disappearance and reappearance of a coin.
Once Barnum had actually stood in as an assistant when the original man ran off right before a show. His mind tried to slide away from what happened next—how was he to know that squirrel would bite? Pentland had pulled that creature out of his hat dozens of times without incident.
Despite the regrettable outcome—Barnum shrieked in pain, smashed the table, and generally caused such a commotion that the audience asked for its money back—he knew enough about curtains and panels to rig up something that would convince everyone the mermaid was real.
And he’d even be able to satisfy Moses and use that old mummy. There could be a separate exhibit with a “scientific” history of mermaids with the monkey-fish at the center of it all.
But first he had to get the public excited about all that. He sat at his desk in the museum, listening to the building settle. The only other sound was that of his pen scratching on paper as he laid out his plan. If he did this right, there would be money falling from the sky.
His mermaid was going to make his fortune. He could feel it.
Amelia had never before slept in a place where she couldn’t hear the ocean. The small guest room where Charity placed her had only one small window, and that provided hardly any air. Amelia had struggled simply to open it in the first place. Nobody seemed to have done so before, and open windows were treated with suspicion by Charity, who appeared content to sit in stifling rooms all day.
Amelia could not smell the ocean from the window, not even the merest breath of salt. There were people out and moving about despite the hour, a continuous clop of horses’ hooves or bootheels on cobblestones.
The ever-present stink of pigs and animal waste drifted into the room, and Amelia closed the small window in frustration. People chose to live in this place, a place where all they could see were buildings and animals and more people and more people and more people, everywhere you went.
Barnum told her proudly that more than three hundred thousand people lived in the city, and more came every day. Amelia marveled that so many would choose to abandon the ocean or the forest or the wide-open fields and choose to live stacked on top of one another in a place where pigs had free rein in the streets. She wondered that she herself had made this choice. New York was supposed to be a marvel, but it mostly just felt like there was no space anywhere.
As for Barnum himself . . . she’d seen the way he looked at her as they’d talked. Like a possession. Like one of the dead things the throngs gawped at in the museum.
She’d noticed, too, the way Levi Lyman tried to stand between Barnum and herself, the way he gave her looks that told her it was better if she didn’t speak as much and left it to him, and how he’d so firmly stated the terms of their agreement in a way that would brook no argument from Barnum. It was clear from his manner that he’d designated himself her protector. She didn’t need protecting, but it was touching all the same.
Amelia let him do it, because she wanted a good look at Barnum. She might not be able to read words very well, but she could read faces, and her mind worked just fine, thank you very kindly. She had a fairly shrewd idea of what Barnum intended—to use her to wring out every coin he could get and to give her as few of them as possible.
Well, she wasn’t going to allow him to do that. She was doing this for her own reasons, and she would be damned before she let P. T. Barnum cheat her. She hadn’t crossed the ocean to be taken in by a confidence man.
Besides, she thought with a little smirk, he still thought she was a fake. His face clearly told her he believed her to be soft in the head. She would enjoy the expression on his face when he saw her change. She would enjoy serving crow to him on a platter.