But when he went to speak to the clerks at the end of the day, none of them had seen the staring man since that morning.
“I recognized him, though, when Mr. Lyman showed me the picture,” Jeremiah Steward told him. “He pays a fee about twelve times a day. I always wondered why. But today he only entered one time. Is he a criminal?”
“He might be,” Barnum said evasively. It was too much to explain to this wet-eared boy that the man stared overlong at the mermaid and made her feel sick to her stomach. “If you see him, you be sure to tell one of the guards, make sure they remove him.”
“I will, sir,” Jeremiah said.
Amelia did not feel comforted by the staring man’s abrupt disappearance. Rather, it somehow made her more uneasy, and she kept watching for him to reappear for the remainder of the day.
“He probably was warned off by Barnum’s presence in the hall. Whatever he wanted from you, he wasn’t about to try it under the owner’s nose,” Levi said. “Barnum can be good for some things, occasionally.”
But Amelia could not lose the feeling that the man had not given up. He had only shifted to the shadows instead of the light, and every moving shadow made her heart stop.
That night she told Charity, in private, that she no longer wanted to stay at the hotel.
“I know Barnum thinks it’s a benefit to the exhibit,” Amelia said. “It’s only that I don’t feel safe there, even with the guards.”
“I’ll speak to Taylor about it,” Charity said.
She had been different since the day she told Barnum she would leave him—more confident, more certain of her own power.
“Levi and I will have you out of that room and back here before tomorrow evening,” Charity said. “Tonight will be the last night, I promise you.”
Amelia rested her head on Charity’s shoulder. “Thank you.”
Caroline, seeing the two of them sitting close together, ran to put her own head on Amelia’s shoulder. Charity laughed.
“Can’t anyone have the mermaid except you?” she asked.
“No,” Caroline said, and put her arms possessively around Amelia’s waist.
Amelia stroked the girl’s hair and wished she could stay right there, safe in the embrace of her sisters.
“It’s only one more evening,” Charity said. “Taylor will take some persuading. You know how he enjoys holding forth for the reporters every morning.”
“Yes,” Amelia said.
But when the time came for Levi to escort her back across the square, Amelia did not want to leave. She hugged Charity at the door with an urgency she couldn’t explain, and when they parted, Charity had tears in her eyes.
“Amelia,” she said.
“Let the girl go. She’ll be back soon enough in the morning,” Barnum said.
“Taylor, let her stay here tonight,” Charity said. “It’s not safe with that man out there. We don’t know what happened to him.”
“He had his fill of the mermaid, or he ran out of pocket money,” Barnum said. “If he tries to enter the museum again, he’ll be turned away. There’s no need to fuss, Charity.”
Amelia could see that for Barnum, the incident was already fading, that his memory was telling him the man wasn’t as much of a threat as he had seemed, that the whole thing had been nothing but a woman’s imagination run wild and now his own wife had caught the disease.
“I’ll watch out for her, Charity,” Levi assured her. “I promise.”
Charity gave him a fierce look. “You had just better, Levi Lyman, or I shall never forgive you.”
She embraced Amelia again and kissed her cheek. “I will see you in the morning.”
Amelia thought Charity meant it to sound like a promise, but it seemed more like a wish, a prayer against harm. Amelia did not know who heard such wishes and prayers, but she hoped they were listening.
Barnum and Charity closed the door behind them as Levi and Amelia walked through the short hallway to the outer door. Amelia paused before they went out into the night.
“Levi,” she said.
She had so many things inside her, so many feelings rising up, filling her throat and her nose and her eyes. There was so much she couldn’t speak, couldn’t tell him about the thing that had been slowly building every time he took her arm or tried to make her smile or arrived with an extra bowl of sugar cubes for her tea.
She didn’t know how to tell him that she relied on seeing him each day, waving from the back of the crowd, that the knowledge that he was somewhere about and would appear was her greatest comfort. She didn’t know how to tell him that she knew what he felt and that he was straight and true and she wanted him, wanted him as she never thought she would want another man after Jack died.
It seemed a strange time for her to finally face these feelings, these things that she’d been pushing down inside and pretending weren’t there ever since the night he stood in her hotel room and apologized for something he hadn’t even done.
Levi looked at her, misinterpreted her expression, and patted her shoulder. “Don’t be troubled by him, Amelia. I promised Charity I would keep you safe, and I will.”
“It’s not that,” she said, and she kissed him.
She tasted surprise on his tongue, and wonder, and delight. And inside her was an answering delight that rose up to mingle with his.
Then she pulled away and looked at him.
“Why now?” he asked.
“Because I wanted you to know,” she said.
He accepted that, the way he accepted all things about her. He offered her his arm again and she took it, and she walked a little closer to him than was strictly polite.
The burning man waited for them.
CHAPTER 12
He rose out of the darkness, and Amelia saw the muzzle of the gun only for a moment before it flashed fire.
Her nose filled with the stink of gunpowder. Levi cried out, but all she heard was his voice, the burning man’s voice. It was slender and reedy and had no power except that of belief.
“This I say then, walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfill the lust of the flesh. For the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh: and these are contrary the one to the other: so that ye cannot do the things that ye would.”
There was blood on her dress, and pain in her body, and she fell to the ground and she was so surprised, surprised and amazed because she thought she couldn’t bleed like this. She had thought she couldn’t die.
The ball was in her stomach, she felt it scorching through her like the burning man’s words, and she didn’t want to discover that she really was mortal after all, not when she’d found Levi and she wasn’t alone anymore.
Levi’s boots were beside her head and then they weren’t. She heard a huffing sound and the impact of a fist on bone, but the burning man didn’t stop talking; he didn’t even slow down because he was on fire inside and Amelia could hear it; she could hear the crackling of the flames and she was sorry for him, sorry because inside him was all this heat and smoke, and if you’re on fire you don’t know what to do with that except light someone else so that they catch fire, too.
“Now the works of the flesh are manifest, which are these: adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, idolatry, witchcraft . . . of which I tell you before, as I have also told you in time past, that they which do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God.”
“Levi,” Amelia said, or thought she said.