She moved forward, ignoring the insistent hawking of vendors selling illustrated guides to the museum.
“Only ten cents! Every visitor should own one!” they called in shrill voices.
The guide was of no use to Amelia. Her funds were limited, and she reckoned she wouldn’t be able to make out all the words in any case.
Amelia followed the flow of the crowd into another room. At first she didn’t understand what the appeal of this room was supposed to be. The walls were paneled in wood, broken up by dozens of windows. Patrons were peering into these little windows (each one only slightly larger than a face) and exclaiming in delight.
She lined up to take her turn at a window next to a man wearing a very tall hat and checked trousers. How Jack would have laughed at those trousers! Amelia felt a pang; she was here to think about something other than Jack, yet somehow every strange thing brought him to mind.
The man in the checked trousers (whose coat trailed a strong scent of pipe tobacco) glanced into the window, consulted his duly purchased illustrated guide, nodded to himself, and gave way for Amelia. She put her face to the glass.
Inside was a tiny scene, like a child’s doll house. A little man poled a thin boat with curved ends through a river. This river connected to other rivers, with more sailors and boats, and graceful bridges arced over the water with little groups of people gathered on them. The people were pointing at buildings that lined the edges of the rivers. Amelia was strongly reminded of the clumps of tourists that surrounded her at that very moment.
A woman next to Amelia harrumphed loudly, indicating her impatience, and Amelia moved to the next window. There she saw a palace rendered in miniature, a white building with a courtyard before it.
Without the guide or anyone to explain what the scenes meant, Amelia quickly grew tired of them. However charmingly assembled, they were nothing more than blank toys to her, devoid of knowledge or context. She moved with the crowd into the next room.
There she was immediately confronted by an assortment of stuffed birds. Though most visitors gasped at the loveliness of various plumages, Amelia had to look away. It hurt her heart to see the remains of these beautiful wild things, now reduced to nothing but an outer skin without a song.
It made her think of something Mr. Lyman had said about the mermaid skeleton—nothing but “a dried-up monkey sewn to a fish tail.” P. T. Barnum wanted to exhibit it—and her alongside—with these other dead things.
She wondered then why she had come. There had been a vague notion of doing as Barnum wished—becoming a mermaid on display so that she could gain enough pay to travel the world as humans did. While she could swim anywhere she liked, she recognized the difficulty of coming ashore—her trip to New York City had proven that. Amelia would need luggage, clothing, the things that people were expected to have. It would be easier if she could travel by boat or train, and even a fisherman’s widow knew you needed money for that.
But this—this room full of dead animals—did she want to be a part of this? Did she want these throngs of people consulting their illustrated guide before staring at her through the glass like those little doll scenes? How was she to escape her rocks and her cottage and her grief and live as a human without money?
The only things she knew how to be were Jack’s wife and a mermaid, and no one would pay her to be Jack’s wife. She’d been living off the money Jack had earned before he died for many years now. It had lasted long because she could eat fish from the sea and didn’t need much that wasn’t already in the cottage. But if Amelia wanted to travel like a human, she would need more. And she wanted to see everything there was to see. So she’d come to the place where a man called Barnum wanted to put her in a tank to swim for these gaping hordes.
It seemed suddenly to be the height of foolishness to have left her cottage, her home. Was viewing any wonder of the world worth the potential cost to her—to be an exhibit stared at by strangers, to possibly be captured by those who might hurt her? What had she been thinking?
She hadn’t been thinking, she admitted to herself. Her sadness had threated to swallow her whole and so she had run from it, run to this place, the only place she’d thought to go because a man had come to her door looking for a mermaid.
Amelia stumbled backward, away from the stuffed birds that stared with their glossy blank eyes. She bumped into an older gentleman (another tall hat, Amelia noted, thinking of the wool cap Jack wore when he went out to sea) who snapped at her to watch herself. She fled toward a corner of the room, away from the press of people, only to be confronted by another stuffed creature.
It was grey and huge, though not as big as some of the animals in the ocean. It had a long tentacle between its eyes, something like the arms of an octopus except without suckers on the underside. The eyes of this animal, too, were made of glass, as dead as a shark’s black gaze. The eyelashes, though, were long, giving the animal an oddly tender look.
A nearby group pointed at the creature, calling it an “elephant,” and marveled that “Barnum had it all the way from darkest Africa.” Amelia wished that she had some magic beyond that of changing her tail to legs. She would lay her hands upon this poor stuffed thing and return it to life again. It would charge through the gawking crowds and into the street, startling all the horses and carriages and scatter the rooting pigs in the streets. It would make silly women faint. Perhaps it would make its way to the ocean, where it would swim back to its home in darkest Africa, wherever that might be.
Just then a din such that Amelia had never heard started up at the opposite side of the saloon. It was music, but a kind of music she could not recognize, loud and blaring and strangely sour.
“It’s the Highland Mammoth Boys!” a woman exclaimed after consulting her program. A rush of people streamed toward the source of the noise.
Amelia covered her ears, shrinking into a notch between the elephant and the wall. The noise seeped through her fingers, making her teeth vibrate. The elephant emitted a strong scent of mothballs, and her eyes watered.
Why had she come? All she wanted now was to escape this place of strange noises and preserved death. The curiosity that once led her to the love of her life had led her to a place that seemed a lot like the hell the too-good women of her village had spoken of with both relish and frequency. She squeezed her eyes shut, childishly wishing it would all go away, and that when she opened them again, she would be back home in her own little cottage with Jack beside her.
He won’t be there. He’s not coming back. He’s never coming back.
But no matter how many times she thought it, her heart refused to believe it was true, and running away from their home had not made her heart believe. He could be there even now, looking around the empty cottage with sad eyes, wondering where she had gone.
The music grew louder, and now it was accompanied by the sound of heavy feet clattering rhythmically on the floor and the cheers and claps of the crowd gathered around. Amelia pressed her hands tighter to her ears, tighter, and the world began to bubble and sway beneath her clamped eyelids. Her skin was suddenly cold and damp. Her knees curled into her chest as she tried to make herself smaller and smaller: small as a mouse, small as a mote of dust, small as the wishes in her secret heart.
Then she felt gentle hands at her wrist—big hands, masculine hands—pulling them away from her ears. The shock had her eyes flying open—Jack—but of course it wasn’t Jack.
“It is you,” Levi Lyman said, and his face had some of the same wonder she’d seen when the museum visitors looked at the elephant. “How is it you’ve come to be here?”