The Transformation of Bartholomew Fortuno: A Novel (28 page)

Her voice seemed to come from a great distance. “Good evening.”

“Ah, you look enchanting.” Barnum! Blood rushed into my head.

Though I could only see Iell’s skirts at that point, I distinctly heard her say, “I’m not feeling well tonight, so forgive me if I’m unable to ask you in.”

“Surely you can spare a moment for me.”

My fists clenched at the sound of rustling cloth. The scoundrel had forced himself past Iell and stood now inside. I wiped a line of perspiration from my upper lip. Get out of this damned closet and stand up for the woman! But Barnum would have my hide. And if Iell had wanted me to protect her, she would not have stuffed me away. If only I’d dug up the root and brought it with me. . . . But I
had
brought the Chinaman’s package for Iell with me. Where was it?

I jockeyed my position until I could just make out the tea table. The package sat right in the middle, next to the bluebells and our two purple glasses. Damn it. What should I do? Iell was still at her front door, but Barnum was stepping past her, his hair flying wildly about his head, his mouth frozen in an angry grin.

“You don’t look the least bit sickly,” Barnum said, staring openly at Iell’s figure beneath her dress. I lifted my fist to pound out my frustration against the cupboard door. No good would come of my bursting out unnecessarily, but I readied myself to do so, just in case.

Iell shut the door behind him. “How ill-mannered of you to insist on coming in after I have told you I am feeling poorly.” Barnum walked toward the parlor. Iell followed. Any moment now, he’d see the package. Barnum stopped abruptly.

“You’ve had a guest?”

The time had come. I took a breath, readying myself. But Iell had somehow gotten around Barnum and now shimmied onto the divan
where I had been sitting. She pulled the scarf I’d returned to her off her shoulders and smiled brightly. What was she doing? Barnum hovered over the tea table, staring at her intently. Then I understood. She was controlling where Barnum was looking, and, with a flick of the wrist, she knocked the package off the table and onto the floor without his noticing.

“I demand to know who visited you,” Barnum barked.

“I’m sure that’s no business of yours, sir.” One graceful readjustment of her skirt, and Iell covered the box.

“You should answer my question,” he said.

“And you should control your curiosity.” Iell wagged her finger at him like an exasperated mother. This seemed to please him mightily. I’d seen Barnum in a lecherous mood before, but Iell was a serious woman, not some acrobat bent on improving her condition by succumbing to her boss’s baser requests. Clearly, she needed no protection at the moment, but I was horrified by his lack of decency.

“Are you at least going to offer me a drink?”

Iell stood, pushing the box beneath the divan with one foot as she said, “It’s obvious that you’ve already had a drink or two this evening. This is why it was a mistake to let you in.”

“Don’t be like that, my dear. I came here for your charming company.” Barnum’s flattery clearly meant nothing to her. She was dismissing him. Barnum trailed behind her as she walked to the front door.

“Are you sure you want me to go? Because if I leave, I can’t give you the little present I brought you.”

Just before Iell reached the front door, she threw her white scarf around her neck, covering much of her beard. “You can give it to me or not, as you wish.”

“Pity.” Barnum burrowed into his pocket and pulled out a small brown box, most likely the same one I myself had fetched for him not so long ago. “Not only is your reliance upon this precious stuff growing, but no one but me can fetch it for you now. I’ve told Fortuno to stop going, and I’m quite certain he’ll obey. Scared to death of me, that lad.”

I blushed furiously. I wasn’t afraid of him. I wasn’t.

Iell stepped out of sight to open her apartment door, and I had to change positions to keep her in sight. “I don’t know why you had him go in the first place,” she said.

“Killed two birds with one stone. Saved me the trouble, and gave him a little punishment for his cheekiness.”

Even alone in the dark closet, my mouth flew open. What an idiot I was. Of course, he’d been toying with me.

“You’re a perverse man,” Iell said. “You know that, don’t you?”

Barnum towered over her. “You call me perverse?”

A silence. Then, “If you don’t mind, it’s late.”

Barnum pressed the brown box into the palm of Iell’s hand. “You really should reconsider, you know,” he said heavily, his voice full of desire. “You’ve only two months left on that contract of yours, but if you do as I ask you can stay as long as you wish. Sit up on your high throne the way you like it. No one will ever know. And I could make you a very wealthy woman.”

He was propositioning her. What a scoundrel. Had he no respect for any of us?

They disappeared through her door and out into the hallway, and I felt the closeness of the cupboard fold down on me again. My heart pounded in my chest as if resting from a chase, and my bones hurt. How dare Barnum call me a coward in front of Iell? Then, the click of the door closing, and the tap of Iell’s heels on the floor.

Iell smiled as she opened the cupboard to me. Such an ambiguous smile. “So,” Iell said. “You see.”

I peeled myself out of the cupboard and grabbed my things, avoiding Iell’s gaze. “It’s not true, you know. I knew exactly what he was up to when he asked me to go to the Chinaman.”

Iell took me by the shoulders. “He likes to exert himself. Nothing to be concerned about, I promise you. Are you all right?” She brushed dust from my shoulders and the front of my coat.

“He treats you shamefully. I trust that you have fended him off?”

“Fended him off?” That splendid mouth smiled, but I could take no meaning from it. Iell went to the divan and snaked her arm beneath
it to reclaim the package I’d fetched for her. Her white scarf floated to the floor.

“It is not like that,” she said. “The bond between myself and Mr. Barnum is—how can I say this?—sometimes uncomfortable, but it is not unsavory in the way you are suggesting.”

“Let me help you. Surely there is nothing that a good friend can’t make better.”

“I’m sorry, but some things need to stay private. That’s simply how it is.”

What in the world could be so private she couldn’t tell me? Feeling rebuffed, I stood and moved toward the front door, assuming she was merely trying to keep me at a distance.

“Wait! You needn’t go.” Iell waved me back to the divan on which she now sat in a grand manner, spine held straight, hands in lap. In front of her on the table were two identical packages.

“Come, let’s finish our nice evening, Bartholomew. May I call you that?”

I inched down into the chair, unsure but charmed by the sound of my given name coming from her lips.

Iell retrieved the scarf, laying it across her lap. “I hope you won’t take Barnum’s comments about you to heart.”

“Let me be clear, madam. I am
not
afraid of Barnum.” My palms went sweaty. I couldn’t even think of telling Iell that it was
Mrs.
Barnum who really put the fear of God in me.

“Of course you’re not afraid. And he’d never have to know if you decided to go to the Chinaman for me again.”

I shook my head. “It’s not that I don’t want to help you.” Another trip would be insanity, though part of me thought there was no better way to avenge myself against Barnum than to aid the lovely Iell.

“I could go myself, of course,” Iell said, paying no mind to my resistance, “but it’s not the safest neighborhood. It wouldn’t do for me to show myself in full daylight. And there’s no one else I’d rather confide in.” She lay back on the divan, lifting her arms up in a languid stretch. “You’re the only one I trust.”

I teetered on the very edge of my chair. “Trust should flow two ways, don’t you think?”

“Absolutely.” Iell’s gaze held no challenge, but no intimacy either.

“At the very least, I’d like to know what I’ve been fetching.”

Iell looked at me pensively, then smoothed down her skirts. “All right, Bartholomew. I owe you that much.”

She rose and walked into another room, returning with a scarlet pouch in her hand. Resettling herself on the divan, she untied the draw-strings on the pouch and pulled out a long bone pipe, its bowl blackened from use, its mouthpiece marred by little nicks and indentations. Teeth marks. Setting the pipe on her lap, she opened one of the boxes on the table and removed a wad of some gummy black substance. She rolled it about in the palm of one hand, forming it into a small ball. After positioning the substance in the bowl of the pipe, she lit it with a match pulled from the tall silver holder sitting on the floor next to her, drawing the smoke deep into her lungs, holding it for an exquisite second, and then gently exhaling. The tension in her thin shoulders melted away.

“I have heard that smoking too much opium is not good for a person,” I said.

“You’ve tried it?”

“No. Of course not.”

Iell held the burning pipe in the palm of her hand. The smoke curled upward like tentacles.

I’d never smoked opium, but I knew all about it. We’d had a knife thrower years ago who’d used it to the point of total dissipation. Barnum eventually had to remove him from the Museum; he found employment for a while as a rat killer, then disappeared in Five Points. Iell’s eyes took on the same quality as the knife thrower’s, and I remembered that morning in Brady’s—how Iell hadn’t seemed to know where she was, how she’d appeared drained and transported. I chided myself for not recognizing her habit then.

“You should not judge me.” Iell closed her eyes and sank onto the divan again, her lovely face partially obscured by the smoke. “My life has not been easy.”

For a moment, I thought she’d fallen asleep. Then she spoke again.

“I was fifteen when my beard began to grow,” she said softly, her eyes closed. “My mother was a woman of decent breeding, but she was burdened with an overblown opinion of her social position. Appearances meant everything to her, and she found my condition very upsetting. So, despite evidence to the contrary, she insisted my hair growth was nothing but a passing confusion of adolescence that would disappear once I made the transition into womanhood. She stole a straight razor from my father and taught me how to scrape the whiskers carefully from my face. This worked for a while. I even fell in love and was married for a short time.”

“Of course,” I said. I was beginning to understand her previous obsession with whether I’d had a choice in who I was. Perhaps it had been
she
who had made the choice to show herself rather than blend.

Iell shifted her position and slowly opened eyes as blue as a robin’s egg. The pipe burned slowly on the table next to her, but she did not reach for it. Her hands lay in her lap. “He was an amazing boy, Bartholomew. Not unlike you, in fact. Handsome, long-legged, kind. We married in the heat of love. He understood and accepted me, every bit of me, but he died, unfortunately. Fell from a wagon and broke his neck. Only twenty years old.”

“I am so sorry.” Handsome like me, she’d said. I felt for her loss, of course I did, but it was a struggle not to smile at the generosity of the comparison.

“After that, I decided it was futile to hide my real self, though I do not always reveal everything. A girl should have her secrets.” She winked at me mischievously and pulled herself out of her chair. “Wait. I have something I’d like to show you. I’ll be right back.”

It was impossible to take my eyes off her as she walked away, but once she left, I realized I’d been holding my breath. I could hear her rummage about in another room, and it only took the sight of her unhurried gait as she returned to set my nerves off once again. She carried a paper yellowed from age.

“You might find this interesting.” Iell settled onto the divan and
spread a small watercolor on the table between us. It was unframed, the paper rolling and a bit discolored from age. She had to struggle to get it to lie flat. Once she did, she looked over at me in satisfaction. It was a drawing of a three-domed building set on a hill surrounded by well-tended grounds, and I could tell that the building had once been quite elegant. But a restraining fence at the bottom of the painting gave the viewer the sense that the place would soon be swallowed up.

“It’s the old McLean asylum,” she explained, childlike and proud. “I painted it when I was young, and I’ve always been proud of it. Look there.” She pointed to the lower left-hand corner. “They had recently built a train line nearby. It ruins the tranquillity of the countryside but also adds a sense of mystery and escape, don’t you think? I thought I rendered the smoke quite admirably.”

“You stayed in an asylum?” I asked, surprised.

“Like your own mother,” she said, “I also became lost for a while. But that is a story for another time.”

Iell took up the pipe again, and I stayed silent, watching her smoke. Now I saw how much she needed my protection and how villainous Barnum was to take advantage of such vulnerability. Their supposed bond surely had to do with Iell’s weakness for opium.

“Barnum,” I said. “Tell me exactly what he wants of you.”

When Iell spoke again, her voice was heavy with the effects of the opium. “He knew I had an attachment to the drug and offered to supply me with what I needed as long as I promised to keep to my rooms and not let it interfere with my shows. But then he began asking for things in return.”

“Does he wish to compromise you?”

Iell’s eyes had taken on a remote quality, and when she looked at me she barely focused on my face.

“No, not at all. He just”—she hesitated in the most charming manner—“he knows things about me. It has more to do with sharing my secrets.”

“Is that all?” I asked. “I don’t see how that could be so damaging.”

Iell turned her eyes from me—though from artifice or true embarrassment, I wasn’t certain.

“What are we but our secrets, Bartholomew? You of all people should understand that.”

I thought about the root. “And you are asking me to help you. Why?”