She also knew that her true form, her water form, did not resemble in the least the advertisements Barnum was designing. These woodcuts depicted beautiful bare-breasted women with fish tails.
Amelia’s people did not look like these. She did not look like a woman when she was in the water. She looked like what she was—a mermaid, a creature of the sea.
So she’d insisted, and quite firmly, that there would be no performance until Barnum witnessed her change.
“That’s enough of this foolishness,” Barnum said.
The tips of his ears turned red—a sign that he was about to display a rare bit of temper. But Levi cut him off before he could get started.
“It’s not foolishness, Taylor. You’ll want to see this,” Levi said.
Barnum looked from Amelia to Levi. “You buy all this nonsense, Levi? I thought you said you never went near the water when you were in Maine.”
“I didn’t need to,” Levi said.
He wasn’t loud or angry or blustering. He just looked at Barnum with steady dark eyes until the other man relented.
“This had better be worth it,” he grumbled.
Barnum still didn’t believe, even though he’d bought the tickets and reserved the hotel rooms. He had to acknowledge there was no mermaid program without her, and with Levi on her side, he’d been close to a mutiny. Amelia knew Barnum wouldn’t risk the whole show, so he’d decided to err on the side of keeping her content.
He’d have preferred, she knew, to be in the museum thinking up schemes and illusions. Barnum had proposed a ridiculous notion that involved Amelia changing into a costumed fish tail in the water of the tank.
“The audience has to see you change from girl to fish, you see? We can use curtains and lighting to do the trick. I was thinking if we showed only your silhouette—”
“You won’t need tricks,” Amelia interrupted. “You only need salt water, and I’ll prove it to you.”
Barnum gave her a dubious look and went on describing his plan to fool the public. She sighed and let him go on talking. He would see soon enough.
She was, she admitted to herself, a little nervous. It was a strange feeling, a queasy shaking in the hollow of her stomach. It took Amelia a long time to figure out just what it was, for she couldn’t recall ever feeling that way before.
This was the first time she’d ever purposely shown someone her water form—the time Jack caught her in his net she hadn’t meant to be seen.
And she certainly hadn’t meant for that fisherman to see her, either—the drunk who’d spread tales of her all up and down the coast of Maine.
Amelia wondered what the villagers would think if they heard she was displaying herself in a tank in New York City. They’d protected her from interlopers like Barnum and Levi, had let her live and grieve in her own way, and she was grateful to them.
But this was her choice now—her choice to be something other than Jack’s wife, or one small town’s mermaid mascot.
What will you be to Barnum, though? What will you be once he sees who you really are?
The hotel was nowhere near the beach, of course. Beachfront property was expensive, and Barnum never paid an extra penny unless it was to a purpose. Besides, they didn’t want to bump into hotel guests while about their business. The mermaid was a secret until someone paid for a ticket to see her.
Levi knew that if circumstances were different—say, if they were touring the country to display the mermaid—Barnum would book them in the finest room in town, with all the attendant fanfare. As it was, Barnum grumbled about the cost of two rooms and the fact that Amelia needed her own.
Amelia gave the showman such a look at this that Barnum actually blushed. It was no small thing to embarrass Barnum; Levi thought he’d been born shameless.
Barnum arranged for a coach to take them to the waterfront several hours after dark. The coachman asked no questions, although he did look askance at two men and one woman leaving a boardinghouse in the middle of the night.
Amelia’s face was veiled. Barnum and Levi wore their hats low over their faces. Levi was unlikely to be recognized, but Barnum might be. You never knew who had been to the museum and spotted him at his desk in the exhibition hall.
Amelia was completely silent during the ride. Levi wondered what she was thinking, then wondered if he would ever have the right to know the answer, if that was a privilege she would ever give him.
The horse and carriage stopped on a little rise, and the three of them climbed out. Amelia waved away Levi’s hand when he offered to help her down. Barnum told the driver to return in an hour, and the three of them waited until the coach was out of sight before descending to the beach.
There was a path that led through tall scrubby grass down to the sand below. The moon rose full and high, and the stretch of beach they were on seemed dangerously exposed, to Levi’s way of thinking. Farther down the beach, perhaps a half mile or more, a large hotel was perched on the rise. But there was no one nearby, no movement on the water or the sand, and Levi thought it would be safe. He hoped it would be safe.
Barnum grumbled about the rocks, the footing, the scratchiness of the grass, but Amelia moved forward with surety toward the ocean. Levi realized he hadn’t seen her this way since Maine; in New York she was just a fraction more hesitant in everything she did. It was as if she constantly weighed and measured every action and potential response for correctness. The result was that she was always sober and distant; he couldn’t recall ever seeing her smile.
Levi had made a game of trying to make her happy—taking her to all his favorite places in the city, bringing her sweets he thought she would enjoy, reading humorous stories aloud in Charity’s parlor.
Amelia’s response was always the same—grave appreciation. It did seem sincere, but there was no joy in it. She reached the beach long before they did. Levi was a little way behind her on the path, and Barnum farther back, not bothering to disguise his curses.
She shed the bonnet and veil first, dropping them in the sand like trash, and unbound her hair as she walked. She’d changed into the same plain dress she wore on her arrival in New York, and now he knew why—the dress was off her body in a flash, a feat she’d never have managed with a gown made for corset and petticoats.
Beneath it she wore nothing at all. He gasped when he saw how thin she was, even thinner than when she arrived, despite Barnum’s edict that she fatten up.
Amelia stopped when she reached the edge of the water. Levi paused at the bottom of the path, staring. Her pale skin seemed luminescent in the moonlight. Barnum stumbled to Levi’s side, muttering under his breath and shaking sand from his pant cuffs.
Amelia glanced over her shoulder, just long enough to be sure they were watching, and Levi sucked in a hard breath. She was smiling.
There was so much pure joy on her face it was like he’d been shown happiness for the first time. Then her feet touched the water and it happened.
The moonlight was as clear and strong as sunlight on that beach and there was no mistaking what happened, but it was still hard to accept. His brain didn’t understand even though he knew she was a mermaid.
Grey scales climbed her white skin, and as they did, her legs seemed to fuse and then disappear and she fell forward into the water.
Her tail flipped up into the night air. She quickly wriggled out of the shallows and disappeared.
It had all happened so quickly that part of him still didn’t believe it. One moment she was there and human; the next moment she was something else and gone.