Her tone made it clear that she thought him very much a fool for believing it.
“Mrs. Douglas,” he said. “You may or may not be an honest-to-goodness mermaid, but it doesn’t matter. P. T. Barnum can make you a mermaid, and make everyone in the world believe that it’s true.”
Amelia frowned. “Who’s P. T. Barnum?”
“P. T. Barnum is a purveyor of wonders, a seller of miracles, a showman of the first order. Mr. Barnum’s museum in New York City is filled with treasures, many never before seen by the viewing public.”
“Ah, I see. Mr. Barnum is what we call a snake-oil salesman,” Amelia said, her lips curving. After all of this the man was nothing but a representative for some huckster!
Levi Lyman plowed on, seemingly oblivious to both her interruption and her contempt. “Mr. Barnum has sent me to ask you, Mrs. Douglas, to come to New York City and perform in the museum as his mermaid.”
“Perform,” Amelia said, her voice flat. “You mean put myself on a stage in a costume like a dance-hall girl.”
Amelia did not despise dance-hall girls, for she was well aware that it was a life many women were forced into against their will. But she also knew that most folk thought of such performers with contempt, disgust, and superiority. Amelia knew how to pretend, how to behave in the accepted manner of the humans around her, and the humans around her expected her to be a “good Christian woman.” A good Christian woman would never lower herself to perform, and her scathing tone communicated this.
Mr. Lyman’s face shifted. “You would not be performing, precisely. Rather you would be . . . an exhibit.”
Amelia raised an eyebrow. “Mr. Barnum wishes me to exhibit myself? He presumes much.”
Her intonation of “exhibit” absolutely dripped with scandalized outrage.
Mr. Lyman seemed to have lost his thread. She could see him grasping about for it, trying to reembroider the words that had come out wrong. “Well, you see, what Mr. Barnum would like is for you to, er, swim about in a tank . . .”
“Wearing, I suppose, a costume that no decent woman should wear in public.”
Amelia was rather enjoying herself now. She observed the shifting calculations in his eyes, the increasing desperation to climb out of the hole he’d inadvertently dug. Soon enough he wouldn’t know why he’d come here in the first place. Then, Amelia thought, she could be rid of him. And perhaps once she was rid of him it might be time to consider a change. She did not want to spend the remainder of her life on land dodging people like Mr. Lyman, people who wanted to find a real miracle and make it pay dividends.
Mr. Lyman put down his cup of tea. “I apologize, Mrs. Douglas. At no time did I mean to imply that your morals were not of the highest standards.”
He stopped, started to speak, stopped again. And sighed.
When he sighed, he seemed to be blowing out all his troubles, his foolishness, his frustration, his belief. He looked up at her with eyes that now burned with shame and sadness.
That sadness was fatal to Amelia. It pierced her, made her sorry for him, and she drew herself up, hoping to pull armor around her body to protect her from what he would say next. It would be, she knew, the truth, and she was powerless against the truth.
“Mr. Barnum has a friend, a man called Moses Kimball who runs a museum in Boston,” Levi Lyman said. He wouldn’t look at her now but rather kept his gaze fixed on the fire. “Moses came to Mr. Barnum with a curiosity to exhibit in the American Museum—that’s Mr. Barnum’s museum. It was a mermaid skeleton.”
Amelia barely swallowed her gasp. Could it be? Could the remains of one of her people have been swept to shore by the tides? Her momentary panic was quashed as he continued.
“Of course it was nothing but a humbug. Any fool could tell it was just a dried-up monkey sewn to a fish tail. But it got Mr. Barnum thinking. And if you knew Mr. Barnum, you’d know he thinks no small thoughts. Moses wanted Barnum to put the monkey-thing on display, but Barnum didn’t think anyone would believe it, especially after . . .”
He trailed off, tugged at his collar. “Well, anyhow, he didn’t think it would be enough to convince the paying public that mermaids were real. So he struck on this notion of having a girl dress up as a mermaid, swim around a tank, and wave at the little ones. I told him it wouldn’t work, that we would be caught if the girl was a fake, but you don’t know Barnum. Once an idea gets in his head you can’t knock it loose with a stick and a net. And then old Moses told him a story. A friend had told him this story, he said, a friend who heard it from a fisherman. And that fisherman said—”
“That he saw a mermaid swimming in the moonlight,” Amelia said, her voice soft. “Yes, I know that story.”
“Of course it’s ridiculous. I know that. Pretty sure Barnum does, too, although with him you never know. He might believe, or hope for it to be true, or not really condone any such thing but know others might. The one thing Barnum does believe in is money and the getting of it.”
Amelia scowled at this. Money was fairly meaningless to her except inasmuch as it was needed for things like sugar and vegetables and cloth to make the occasional dress. Mr. Lyman saw her expression and hurried to correct any poor impression brought on by the mention of dollars and cents.
“He wants to make money, sure, but mostly what he wants is to amaze folks. He wants to take them out of their little lives and show them something wonderful. I could tell—I could see it in his eyes when he was talking—that the idea of the mermaid was just what he wanted. What could be more magical, more wondrous, than a woman who could change her tail into legs, who rose out of the sea like Venus?”
Amelia’s memory of the first time she changed was not so wondrous. She did not share the remembrance of cold and the shock of falling instead of standing on her fresh new legs. But for a moment she’d felt the enchantment of his words, seen the shining eyes of the children as they gazed upon that wonder—the mermaid.
Then she remembered how Jack had feared for her, and how carefully they had hidden her secret. She recalled, too, that she would be the one everyone stared at. She wouldn’t be one of the paying customers of this wonder but the main attraction.
“It sounds delightful when you put it that way, Mr. Lyman. But I fail to see how it has anything to do with me, especially if you don’t believe the tales.”
“It’s because the stories were told about you, specifically,” he said. “If Mr. Barnum were to hire any girl from anywhere and present her as a mermaid, we’d be found out in a minute. Some reporter would sniff out that ‘Christiana, the wonder of the Seven Seas’ was actually Bertha Cummings from some backwater in Connecticut. The show would be over. But if you’re the mermaid and a nosy reporter tries to track down your origins, what will he find?”
“The same story that brought you to my door,” Amelia said.
The logic was sound, but she would give no such concession to him. She did not want him to go away feeling any encouragement.
“Well, Mr. Lyman, I’m sorry you’ve come all the way from New York for this, but I’ve no wish to leave my home. You’ll have to find Bertha from the backwater, I’m afraid.”
Her tone was final. There was no space in it for pleading, arguing, or bribing. She wished him to go.
He stood, his face stiff. “I’m very sorry to have troubled you.”