Ark Baby (41 page)

The Contortionist was standing in front of him, gazing into his blue and strangely human eyes. She was oblivious to my presence; for a while, we both stood there staring at the monkey, each lost in his own thoughts. Finally I cleared my throat.

‘Excuse me, madam?’ I said.

She jumped, and turned to look at me. She seemed to be crying; the frills of her little ballet tutu were trembling.

‘Madam, I believe you are my mother.’

She stared at me. She said nothing. She just stared.

‘And this – gentleman – is my father,’ I ventured. ‘Am I right?’

‘Lawks a mercy,’ she said, sucking in her breath. ‘Fancy meeting you here.’

She bit her lip. I held out my hand, and she took it. We shook hands formally.

‘Madam, I think you owe me an explanation,’ I mustered.

‘S’pose I do, Tobias,’ she said, sighing. ‘S’pose I do.’

‘You – know my name?’

‘Yes.’

She told me everything. Horace Trapp had kidnapped her, and kept her in a cage on his
Ark.

‘It was an old slave-trader,’ she said. ‘Cos that’s what he used to do. Travelled between London and Africa and Georgia, selling slaves. But then he had a shipload die on him, and there was a big scandal in London. So he switched to animals instead, got this caper going for Queen Victoria. The Animal Kingdom Collection.’

I nodded. This much tallied with what Dr Scrapie had told me.

‘But I finds out he has some other business. And that’s why
I’m in the cage with – this dear gentleman,’ she said. Her voice softened, and she took the monkey’s hand in hers as she spoke. It was an oddly moving sight.

‘Other business?’ I asked. ‘What sort of other business?’

But she ignored me; she appeared to be speaking almost from a trance. ‘It’s Higgins tells me what Trapp’s planning. Trapp never bothers to tell me himself, does he? There I was then, having this idea that I was just there to keep the gentleman company, like a playmate for him. But he’s soon a lot more than that to me.’

I blushed, as the little woman continued the extraordinary tale of my genesis.

‘I discovers I’m up the spout, around the same time as I discovers that this is what Trapp was wanting all along.
That
was his other business.’

‘He
wanted
you and the – gentleman here – to …?’

I was unable to find the words to complete my question.

‘Yes. Higgins tells me he was hoping to breed from us.’

‘
Hoping
to breed?
Hoping
to? Why?’ I felt sick.

‘Slaves,’ she said. A chill ran through me. ‘He had this theory. After the scandal over his dead slaves, and the campaign to have the trade abolished, he’d been hatching this plan to mate a human with a monkey, to get an offspring. To breed a new kind of slave, that’s not completely human. “A race of natural inferiors”, he calls it. If you’re not strictly speaking a man, see,’ she said, ‘you haven’t got no rights like men does.’

I gasped.

‘But why?’ I asked.

‘Profit,’ murmured my new-found mother. ‘He was after making a profit. He’d seen the slave trade coming to an end. He reckoned the problem all along with the human slaves was that they’d end up with the same rights as other folk. The only way to ever get that kind of cheap labour again without a big hoo-ha was to create –’

‘I see,’ I said.

‘Yes. But he hadn’t bargained on my gentleman friend.’

We both looked at him, with a mixture of pity and awe.

‘Anyway, when I finds this out, that that’s what he’s planning, that’s when I know we has to escape, even if it means –’

She hung her head.

‘They all died,’ she said bluntly. ‘It happened the night the storm was brewing. When Steed comes to give us our slop, I distract him with a few little favours while my gentleman friend sneaks the key to our cage from his pocket. When they’ve gone back up to their cabins, we opened all the animals’ cages to take attention away from us, and they all shot out and started rioting, and ripping each other to pieces.’ She paused, and squinted painfully at the memory. ‘It was a nightmare. They was all killing each other and my gentleman friend, when he sees Trapp come towards us, he pounces on him, and grabs him by the throat, all ready to kill him, and I’m screaming at him to do it, to strangle him, but Trapp’s got a syringe in his hand and as soon as the needle goes in, my gentleman friend just falls to the floor stone dead.’ Her eyes fill suddenly with tears.

‘So it was Trapp who killed him? With the syringe?’

‘Yes.’ She looks up at me, and the tears fall. She makes no attempt to wipe them away. ‘He died trying to save my life, Tobias. And yours. I couldn’t stop him.’ She is sobbing now. ‘I saw him die.’

Tentatively, I put my arm around her, and hand her my handkerchief. She grabs it and blows her nose furiously.

‘He loved life so much,’ she’s whispering through her tears. ‘He was so funny, so clever, so innocent. So good-hearted. He was all instinct. I realised as soon as I saw him in the light of day that he wasn’t a man. I never pretended he was.’ She strokes his arm. ‘He was more than a man.’ She pauses. ‘And he was better than a man.’ The tears begin again. ‘He laid down his life for us, Tobias,’ she wails. ‘He wasn’t called a gentleman for nothing.’

I swallow painfully. ‘And then?’ I whisper.

‘When I sees he’s dead,’ she sniffs, ‘that’s when I jumps ship. I have no idea where we are. Could be in the Caribbean, for
all I know. In fact it’s the English Channel. We must’ve been on our way back. Anyway, I swims till I’m half-drowned. I’m just wearing my tutu. Bloody cold, it was. Near froze, but I’m a strong swimmer. Then I gets caught in a fishing net, and pulled along. Must’ve been dragged aboard with all the fish, cos when I wakes up, I’m on a fishing boat, stinking. The next thing I know, I’m in London bloody docks, of all places. Went straight to the workhouse. I got there, and gave birth to you.’

I felt myself swaying on my feet.

The Contortionist laughed suddenly. ‘Silly of me, but when I saw your tail, I still got the shock of my life.’

‘What is zis, Violette?’ asks Cabillaud, reappearing before her with the fan she has dropped, and flapping it to cool her. ‘You are not well,
ma chérie
?’

He has seen this look before. Years ago, on his own face, when he gazed in the mirror aboard the
Beagle
, and thought of his sweetheart Saskia.

‘No. I am suddenly most terribly unwell!’ croaks Violet, still clutching her chair. ‘You must help me, Monsieur Cabillaud! My father is planning to kill and stuff the man I – the gentleman I –’

‘Love,’ finishes Cabillaud. He knows. It is written all over her face. ‘You must escape wiz ’im, zen,’ he suggests.

‘How?’ wails Violet, kneading her pudgy hands together in distress.

‘I will open ze kitchen doors for you,
ma chérie
! Now go and get ’im! Quick!’

Violet, her heart beating like a war-drum in her heaving bosom, scans the room; the two scientists and their accompanying mob of laughing guests have finished their search of the northern corner of the ballroom, and are now heading west in the direction of another marble pillar.

‘I told him to bloody-well stay put!’ she hears her father
shrieking as he strides through the dancing throng, still frog-marching Darwin with him.

‘This is a most amusing game of hide-and-seek, is it not?’ laughs Mr Darwin good-naturedly. He had not wished, initially, to attend the Banquet, bad health and a hermit-like disposition combining to make him shun most public occasions – but he has been pleasantly surprised by this evening’s turn of events.

‘Hey! Has anyone seen a monkey-man?’ yells Scrapie. And the mob takes up the cry.

Lifting up the billowing swathes of her skirts, Violet rises from her chair and hurtles off in the direction of the ladies’ powder room like a human torpedo.

My mother had left me speechless.

‘He’s the only reason I come here to do this banquet job,’ she said, still stroking the Gentleman Monkey’s hairy arm. ‘I heard he was here. Friend of mine, Nancy, I told her all about him and me. Her man Frank, he’s a Palace footman. She says to me she’s sure my gentleman’s here, from what Frank’s said. That settles it. When Hillber talks to me about the Time-Bomb, I says yes. I’d’ve done anything to see him again, one last time.’

The tears were running freely down her cheeks, leaving grey tracks. I, too, brushed away a tear as the Contortionist continued her story.

‘So you were born in the workhouse. When they saw you, with your tail, and your monkey feet, they said I’d mated with the Devil, and they chucked me out. I came straight to the Fairground. I knew there was a way of making money, and we did – hand over fist. You were called the Devil-Child of Greenwich. It’s the workhouse people in Greenwich, what gives me the idea to call you that.’

Devil-Child? I was far from keen on the sound of this, but I held my tongue. Instead I asked, ‘And then what happened? How did I lose my tail?’

‘Well, I kept you in a cage –’

‘A cage?’ I interrupted. ‘You kept me in
a cage?
’ I remembered my vision during the Flood: I had seen a cot with golden bars, guarded by a beast.

‘I was working, wasn’t I?’ she said. ‘I didn’t have the choice. I had to do this contortionism thing: human knots and all that. Mr Hillber wasn’t just going to pay me for existing, was he? But you wouldn’t suckle from anyone else, so he had to keep me. Anyway, your cage is right next to the Man-Eating Wart-hog’s.’ I had a sudden memory of the creature; its orange-ochre eyes, with their vertical slits; its vile carbuncles. I shivered.

‘Well, it’s thanks to him you lost it. He’s a tricky customer. He’s hungry one day, or playful. You tail is sticking through his bars. So he –’

She stops. Looks embarrassed. Ashamed. Then drops her voice.

‘He bites it off.’

My God. Again I remembered my vision in the church during the Flood. Suddenly it all made sense. The Angel. The creature. The blood. The screaming, shrill and hoarse.

‘I remember it,’ I said. She had been the Angel.

‘But he didn’t like the taste,’ she said, giving a little bitter laugh. ‘He spat it out. We tried to sew it back on, but it was no use, so I stuck it in an old jar of pickle.’

She paused, and began to stroke my father’s furry cheek wistfully. For my own part, I was having trouble taking all this in. All my life I had wondered about my origins. But now – it was as if a dam had burst, and the answers to all my questions were all gushing out at once. I was left reeling.

‘After you’d lost your tail,’ my mother continued, ‘you were doing badly. You had a fever, and I knew that unless you saw a doctor, you was going to die. Mr Hillber said you’d have to go. You were no use to him without a tail, and to be honest, I knew that if you were to stand a chance, I’d have to –’ She stopped again, clearly distressed.

‘Abandon me,’ I finished.

‘Yes. That’s about the size of it.’ Her voice was a mere croak,
lost in the increasingly wild noises coming from the banqueting hall. She wasn’t looking at me when she spoke. She was looking at the creature. Staring into his blue glass eyes, as though she could read the past in them.

‘The circumstances was most particular,’ she murmured.

‘I am sure they were,’ I whispered. I felt a lump in my throat.

‘So I left you in a little church, in a village near Judlow. Thunder Spit, it was called. I kept your little tail as a sort of memento,’ she said softly. ‘To remind me of you, and of my gentleman friend, and what happened between us.’

‘How did you know about Parson Phelps?’

‘I didn’t, when I left you. I had no idea. I just reckoned a church was as likely a place as – well, you know. Charity, and all that. And I wasn’t wrong, was I?’

‘No, I said, remembering Parson Phelps’ story of finding me beneath the altar of St Nicholas’s Church the day after the Fair left Judlow, and his piglet story.

Wrong animal, I thought.

‘Parson Phelps saved my life, then,’ I murmured.

‘Yes. Parson Phelps,’ she said. ‘Though I doesn’t find out his name till later. I asked about you every time the Fair came to Judlow. Asked a few questions, you know. Looked out for you. Didn’t even know if you’d survived or not, but thought you would have. You were a tough little bugger. Then I meet a man who I service once a year at the Fair, a bit of money on the side, turns out he’s a cobbler from Thunder Spit.’

‘Mr Hewitt?’

‘Dunno. I don’t do names. Names is extra. They want me to use a name, they pay. Your Grace costs more. Any kids there with funny-shaped feet, I asked him. Great big fat man, smelt of leather. Just the Phelps boy, he says. The Parson’s son. Tobias. I don’t do names, but I remembered those two, Parson Phelps. And Tobias. Wrote them down, after. The cobbler docks me sixpence for jabbering while he was at it, and spoiling his peace and quiet, but after that I knew you were alive.’

She turned to look at me, and I saw that the tears were once more trickling down her face, leaving little painted rivulets on her cheeks. She looked suddenly old.

‘I saw you,’ I stammered. ‘At the Travelling Fair of Danger and Delight. I saw you doing your act.’

‘And I saw you, too,’ she said slowly. She held out her arms to me, and we clasped each other tight. She was sobbing into my shoulder now. ‘And I saw the fear on your face. It nearly killed me, that.’ I fought back my own tears now.

‘But then, the next year,’ she’s sobbing, ‘some bloke in Hunchburgh attacks me when I’m doing my sherry-glass act, and I need some money bad. I tied myself in a knot, got all twisted up, couldn’t work. Hillber refused to pay me. So when we goes on to Judlow, I goes to the Parson with the jar. And a letter, telling him the story.’ She looked up at me then, and I saw that there was a small glimmer of pride on her face. ‘I wrote it myself,’ she said. ‘I learned writing when I was a girl.’

But I pulled back from her. ‘You blackmailed him with this jar, and your letter?’ I asked, looking into her tear-stained face. Her eyes dropped, and would no longer meet mine.

‘Call it what you like. He paid me all he had to get rid of me. He made me promise I’d never approach you, or tell you about the tail.’