No, he didn’t want to lose them. There was nothing more embarrassing than a man whose wife left him, and the newspapers would surely get wind of it.
He felt something tight in his stomach unclench then. He would have to let the mermaid have her way. He couldn’t be at loggerheads with her and the others for the duration. He would just have to think of a way to make up the lost income while she was lounging about. Keepsakes, perhaps. Mermaid dolls? Or books about the mermaid?
Barnum felt a slow smile cross his face. Yes, he could still profit by her even if the mermaid wasn’t swimming in the tank. And her contract didn’t say anything about souvenirs. He wouldn’t have to share a cent with her.
CHAPTER 11
The man had been watching her for too long.
Amelia usually avoided catching the eye of any one person in the crowd. The number of faces quickly became overwhelming, so she’d developed a technique of passing just over their heads with her gaze.
This gave the sense that she was looking at them, and perhaps even had looked directly at one person (she’d heard more than one delighted squeal of “She looked right at me!” even through the suppressing blanket of the water). The only exception was for children.
She made a special point of waving at them, doing tricks for them, and generally trying to convince them that she was not as frightening as she looked.
She didn’t want the children to be afraid of her. She wanted them to wonder at her, like Caroline did.
The man who’d stared too long stood just to the left of the front of the tank and far enough back that he hadn’t attracted the attention of the two guards. He was not very tall but he was extremely thin—his shoulders could hardly hold up the sleeves of his jacket. His face had the sharp angles of near-starvation.
Amelia could tell, even with her limited knowledge of such things, that the man’s coat was of good quality, so it was not poverty that kept the food from his mouth. His face was expressionless, but his eyes burned—burned with a passion that she thought she’d seen before.
There was a traveling preacher who’d passed by her cottage one day, a long time ago, and had tried to tell her of the Lord and the sinfulness of women and repentance and other things that sounded like nonsense to her and she’d told him so. His eyes had burned the same way the staring man’s did, lit by fire and righteousness.
The preacher wouldn’t stop shouting at her, so she’d gone inside her cottage and locked the door and made tea until he’d gone away to find some other woman to shout at.
This man wasn’t shouting, but he looked as though it might be a natural state for him. He looked as though he might share that traveling preacher’s ideas on the sinfulness of women and the need to repent.
Amelia glared at him and showed her teeth. Several people gasped at the sight, but the man appeared unaffected. Amelia decided it was best to ignore him as she had done with that preacher.
The saloon will be cleared soon, in any event, she thought. He’ll be shooed out with the crowd and that will be the end of that.
But when she returned to the tank after her rest and a much-needed pot of tea, she discovered the man had returned also. He took up his spot again, staring at her, letting the crowd eddy around him. A few people looked at him askance, but for the most part he was invisible. Everyone was looking at the mermaid, and so no one noticed or cared about one strange individual who seemed fixated on the very being they wanted to see.
It was the same after every break for the remainder of the day. The staring man would be removed; when the crowd returned, so did he. As the day dragged on, Amelia found it difficult to pretend she didn’t see him there, and her eyes strayed more frequently to his corner.
I shall speak to Levi about him, she thought.
Levi had been released from his two-week isolation after “Dr. Griffin’s” return to London. The removal of the beard and the return of Levi’s American accent and plain dress seemed to be enough to convince everyone they were not the same person. Amelia understood now why people were so easily fooled by Barnum’s humbugs. No one observed closely enough to see the truth.
Since his return to the museum, Levi had been certain to stop and see Amelia throughout the day. Sometimes it was just a wave from the back of the moving throngs; sometimes he came in to see that she had enough food or drink or blankets when she was resting. He always waited for her at the end of the day, whistling outside the curtain while she labored into her clothes, and then escorted her to Barnum’s for dinner.
Since the day Charity had seen Amelia’s true self, Charity couldn’t do without her at the dinner table and for many hours after. Amelia was happy to be there with her, for now that the other woman had thawed, they spent many a happy evening side by side on the sofa in the parlor, playing games or whispering to each other like schoolgirls, with Caroline often their third conspirator.
Yes, she would tell Levi about the man. Levi could arrange to have the guards keep watch for him. There was little Amelia could do from inside the tank, especially since they were still maintaining the fiction that she could not speak.
Amelia was dressing at the end of the day when Levi called out to her.
“Nearly ready?” he asked.
Amelia hurriedly tucked her damp hair into a braid and emerged from behind the curtain.
Levi smiled when he saw her, but before he could ask about her day (a thing he liked to do, even though nearly every day was the same as the last and she said so) she told him about the staring man.
Levi frowned. “He was here all day? You’re certain?”
“Of course I am,” she said. “One could hardly miss him.”
“Well, the guards obviously did,” Levi said. “If he was standing there all day, then he must have kept circling around to the front and paying the entrance fee over and over. It’s not easy to return to this saloon—the flow of people means you can’t really double back, and surely it would have caused a noticeable fuss if he kept pushing against the crowd.”
“Why would anyone want to pay to stare at me all day?” Amelia asked.
“I have some ideas,” Levi said. “I’ve been half expecting something like this to happen. Although I thought there would be some editorials first, or demonstrating in the street while women wailed and men read from the Bible.”
“I thought he reminded me of that preacher,” Amelia murmured. “His eyes burned.”
“When we first proposed the exhibit, I was worried about the church ladies,” Levi said. “There’s a fair bunch of folks always concerned about indecency. Even if you are clearly not human when in the water I thought they might object to . . .”
He trailed off, then gestured awkwardly in the direction of his own chest.
“You thought they might object to my bare breasts?” Amelia said, her lips curving at his discomfort. “That might be true, but I think most people who see me just don’t think of me as human, or even half human. Especially the ones who have only seen me here at the museum. At the Concert Hall the audience saw me walk across the stage first. They were aware that part of me was human. Here they only see me as a—”
She stopped, because she hadn’t really considered this before, and now that she had, it bothered her.
“As a what?” Levi asked.
“As an animal in a cage,” Amelia said. She shook her head. “Barnum was right about that.”