“And a woman died,” Amelia said. “I nearly did, too. I should have left him then, after Elijah Hunt shot me for his God, and told Barnum that his contract didn’t mean anything to me.”
“Don’t human contracts mean something to you?” Levi asked.
He wasn’t asking about her agreement with Barnum. Of course he wasn’t. He wanted to know if their marriage certificate was waterproof.
“I love you, Levi,” she said. “I am happy to be your wife. But I can’t stay Barnum’s mermaid and your wife, too. I need for this tour, these performances, to be over. Whatever we were both looking for—it wasn’t really money. It was magic, the promise of a life washed clean of our past. Barnum can’t give us that, but maybe we can give it to each other.”
“I don’t think you are happy with me,” he said. “I’ve watched you, you know. I’ve seen your face, that face I once thought as deep and dark and unfathomable as the ocean. You can’t hide the way you feel anymore, not from me. I’m not the man you wanted me to be.”
“Levi, it’s only all this that’s making me unhappy,” Amelia cried. “It’s not you. It’s not.”
“I’ll write to Barnum,” Levi said, as if he hadn’t heard her. His eyes had gone someplace cold and far away. “I’ll tell him that after Charleston you will leave the tour. Barnum will make such a fuss over the cost of the hall and the tank otherwise. If he wants to continue with a mermaid exhibition he can always send Moses’s mummy out. That was the idea in the first place. We never thought we’d come upon a real mermaid.”
“And then?” Amelia asked.
“And then you will be free—from Barnum, from me, from life as a human. You can be free to go to the ocean, where you will be happy,” he said. “I only ever wanted you to be happy.”
Amelia couldn’t believe she was hearing this. Had he heard nothing she said? She didn’t want to leave him, only Barnum.
“It will make me happy to stay with you,” she said, trying to show him with her eyes what was in her heart. “I have loved so many things about you—your kindness, the way you try so hard to make me laugh, the way I feel when you hold me. I love you and I have never lied to you. I’ve never lied to anyone, not even when I was the Feejee Mermaid, for I’ve never had to tell the lies Barnum spun. Why will you not listen to me when I speak? Why will you not understand?”
“I understand better than you think,” Levi said.
“No, your pride is hurt,” Amelia said. “And because your pride is hurt you’ve decided what’s best, and what’s best is for me to leave so that you stop hurting.”
“I’ll write to Barnum,” he said, and left the room.
She followed him out. He heard her footsteps in the hall behind him and turned back.
“Go back inside,” he said.
“No,” she said.
“Shhh. Someone might hear you,” he said, taking her by the wrist.
She wrenched away from him. “I don’t care. This fiction of my being unable to speak is ridiculous. If you leave I will follow you. I will shout and scream and cause a scene until you come back inside this room and understand what you mean to me.”
His face reddened as he realized she was in earnest. He was imagining the fuss, the scene, the people staring at him. “I’ll come back inside, and we will speak quietly about this.”
“If I want to speak loudly I will,” Amelia said. “You can’t stop me.”
“No,” he said, his façade of calm breaking. He slammed the door shut behind them. “I can’t stop you from doing anything you don’t want to. Barnum always said it, and I thought it was funny when it was him you had twisting.”
“I don’t belong to you,” Amelia said. “You thought if I married you that I would, but I don’t. I don’t belong to any man—not to Jack, not to Barnum, not to you. I only belong to myself. But belonging to myself doesn’t mean I don’t love you or that I don’t want to stand beside you.”
“You don’t understand human marriages,” Levi said. “A woman is supposed to cleave to her husband, to trust him to make the best decisions for her.”
Amelia took a deep breath. “You’re right. If that’s the way you want us to live then I should leave. But if you don’t—if you can see things my way—then I want to stay with you. I want to be your partner, not your possession.”
His face contracted, and she saw so many emotions pass there for an instant and then disappear—anger, and pride, and confusion, and longing. Finally it settled into a deep, deep sadness.
“I don’t want to live without you,” he said.
It cost him something to admit it, she could tell. He was giving up some wrongheaded notion he’d had of her, some human idea of a woman that had lodged in his brain.
“I was dazzled by you the first time I saw you on that cliff, dazzled by your difference, the way you were unlike anyone I’d ever seen. I have loved everything in you, everything that made you not human—the way you never back away from an argument, the way you look so clearly into my eyes and expect me to meet you there. I didn’t marry a human woman. I forgot that, for a little while.”
“Then isn’t our love more important than your pride?” she asked, and she felt something in her pleading for him to say yes. “Isn’t it? We can be happy. I know we can.”
“I don’t know if we can,” Levi said. “But I want to try.”
She went to him then, and the space between them dissolved, and though there wasn’t any joy yet, she thought there could be. They had only to seek it together.
“I’ll write to Barnum,” Levi said. “After Charleston it will all be over.”
CHAPTER 15
The first sign of trouble was the editorial in the Charleston Courier. It didn’t seem a portent at the time, Levi thought later, for the review of the exhibit was primarily positive.
“‘The natural curiosities too are well worth a visit from the curious and scientific—and most curious among them is the Fee-jee beauty—the mermaid, hitherto believed to be of fabulous existence,’” Levi read aloud. “He called you a beauty.”
Amelia shrugged. “I’m sure his opinion isn’t widely shared, but Barnum will be happy if it brings more people to the exhibit.”
Levi continued. “‘We, of course, cannot undertake to say whether this seeming wonder of nature be real or not, it not being in our power to apply to it any scientific test of truth; but this we deem it but just to say, that we were permitted to handle and examine it as closely as could be effected by touch and sight, and that if there be any deception, it is beyond the discovery of both those senses.’”
Amelia frowned. “He’s lying. He never touched me, nor would he be allowed to. No one is even permitted to approach the tank.”
“I believe he’s trying to convince anyone who doubts you exist to come and see the exhibit,” Levi said. “And he’s trying to establish at least some degree of scientific credibility, and perhaps an impression that as the editor of this newspaper he is afforded special privileges.”
“Are there still people who don’t believe I’m a real mermaid?” Amelia asked, her voice full of surprise. “Anyone who has seen the exhibit has to believe at least that much. I can’t believe anyone thinks I’m a hoax.”
“I’m not certain,” Levi said, frowning. “I didn’t think that doubt would be a concern at this late date. But perhaps the people of Charleston are more skeptical than their northern neighbors.”