Levi, don’t. Levi, help me. Help me. It hurts.
Her voice seemed so quiet and so small. She wasn’t sure her words made it out of her mouth. They seemed stuck behind her teeth.
There was more thudding, the persistent wet sound of Levi’s fist hitting the other man’s face and making it bleed.
“Levi,” she said.
Help me I’m on fire.
But he couldn’t hear her, because her insides were blazing and her voice was trapped in the smoke and the door to the Barnums’ apartment opened behind her and then Charity was screaming, screaming, screaming.
She’s not getting better,” Levi said.
Dr. Graham had exited Amelia’s sickroom with such a sober expression that Levi didn’t need to hear what the man had to say. Charity stood beside Levi, her fingers twisting in a handkerchief. She hadn’t stopped crying in the three days since Amelia was shot.
Caroline had taken to her room, where she did nothing except lie on her bed and stare at the ceiling. She refused to eat more than a few bites of toast and would not speak to her father at all.
This, Levi thought, was because Caroline had come upon Charity shouting at Barnum that this was his doing, and that if he’d only taken Charity’s concerns seriously, Amelia would never have been out at that hour so that a madman could shoot her.
Barnum had stuttered and stammered and tried to tell her that he’d done everything he could, but Charity felt the shooter would never have had his opportunity if only Barnum had listened to someone besides himself.
Caroline, who always sided with her mother, had given Barnum such an unforgiving glare that he’d subsided into silence and not attempted to defend himself since.
The doctor shook his head. “Her fever is still too high. I’m afraid to bleed her. I don’t know what it would do to a mermaid’s body.”
Dr. Graham had removed the lead ball from Amelia’s stomach, but he’d been reluctant to do much more than that. Levi didn’t know if this was because he was genuinely worried about the effect of human medicine on Amelia or if he was genuinely worried that Barnum would blame him for any negative outcome. The doctor seemed to think that Barnum might become litigious if Graham were somehow responsible for Amelia’s death.
He was also under the misapprehension that Amelia “belonged” to Barnum. Neither Levi nor Charity bothered to correct him on the subject. Levi, for one, didn’t care at all what the man thought as long as he made Amelia better.
But he didn’t make her better.
“I changed the poultice, and I left a bottle of laudanum if she wakes and has any pain,” Graham said, putting on his hat and coat.
“Do you think that’s likely? That she’ll wake?” Levi asked.
Dr. Graham looked at Charity, who was watching him with a hopeful expression, then shook his head.
“I think you should prepare yourself,” he said. “I don’t know what can be done for her.”
Charity sobbed into her handkerchief and left the hall. Levi saw Dr. Graham to the door. He managed to remain polite to the man, but Levi felt unreasonably angry with the doctor. He thought Graham could do more, try harder . . . what did it matter that he wasn’t a specialist in mermaid biology? There was no one on land who had such a specialty. Was it better to let Amelia die because he was afraid?
Levi went into the bedroom where Amelia lay with her eyes closed. The room smelled of sick, sickness and death, that sour-sweet decay that made Levi think of rotting leaves.
He lifted the bandage and poultice the doctor had applied so he could check her wound. A foul-smelling greenish ooze emitted from the hole in her stomach. Dark lines radiated away from the wound, covering her skin. They were spreading like tree branches, growing longer and longer each day.
Her skin was covered in sweat, soaking her hair, but her lips were dry. Amelia’s whole face was sunken, the bones of her face sharp like the man who had shot her.
His name was Elijah Hunt, and the newspaper reporters who’d waited night after night in the Park Hotel for a story had been rewarded when they heard Charity screaming. The reporters were there before the constables, before the doctor, even before Levi had finished beating Hunt senseless. They saw Amelia on the ground, covered in blood, and the “eyewitness reports of the mermaid’s condition” resulted in several gruesome and tasteless drawings on the front pages the next day.
The night watch arrived after Barnum lifted Amelia and took her into the apartment, firmly closing the door on the crowd of reporters outside.
In lieu of Barnum or a bleeding mermaid, they had crowded around Levi and the unconscious Hunt, but Levi wouldn’t tell them anything. He only hung on grimly to Hunt’s arm until a watchman arrived, and then the watchman sent a runner for a constable.
In the meantime, Hunt regained consciousness enough to start talking again. Levi heard a lot of nonsense about the wages of sin being death and the temptations of women’s flesh, so he shook the man hard and told him to shut up.
The reporters all complained and told him to let the man speak, that he had a right to tell his story, and they asked Hunt, “Why did you do it?” but the man only repeated that the wages of sin were death and that the mermaid had been sent by the devil to tempt man to unnatural lust.
“Unnatural to want to fornicate with a sea creature, an animal with half a woman’s form,” Elijah Hunt said. It made Levi sick to be near him, this madman with spittle on his lips and the light of righteousness in his eyes.
Elijah Hunt had been taken to the Tombs, where he was to be held until his trial for attempted murder. In the meantime, a few enterprising writers paid off the guards to have a chance to talk to the man who’d shot the mermaid. The reporters were practically slavering for the trial—a murder trial (even if it was only an attempted murder trial) was worth thousands of newspaper sales.
It didn’t matter if all the papers put the same information on the front page. Readers loved tales of blood and scandal and madness, and this case had all of that plus a mermaid and P. T. Barnum.
Levi didn’t care about Elijah Hunt or his reasons. He didn’t care about the man’s trial, either, and he hoped like hell it wouldn’t be for murder. If Elijah Hunt was tried for murder, that would mean Amelia was dead, and he couldn’t bear the thought of it.
And Levi was sick to death of the reporters. As Dr. Griffin he’d performed for them, manipulated them. As Levi Lyman he was tired of the way the newspapermen hovered and buzzed and pressed, the way they refused to leave even if you refused to speak.
Barnum cared about Hunt, though. He cared because the man’s zealotry had brought, as he put it, “all the other Bible-readers out of the woodwork.”
Every day now there was a demonstration of good Christian men and women outside the museum, reading scripture passages and holding signs condemning the museum for propagating sin. Letter writers wrote passionate invectives excoriating Barnum for showing what amounted to a naked woman in his museum.
A fair number of letter writers also wrote in defense of the mermaid, citing the wonder they’d felt at seeing one of God’s truly magical creatures. Barnum liked these letters, but the tally pile for them was a great deal smaller than the angry ones.
The museum had been closed indefinitely, because it was impossible to keep out the chanting righteous crowd of Christians. They kept pushing into the front doors and dispersing without paying the fee. They would run about the museum and disrupt the enjoyment of the customers. Barnum decreed it all past bearing and shut the museum down entirely.