“Let me go to die and go to glory as a free woman.”
Barnum looked up. It wasn’t Joice’s voice he’d heard, but Levi’s.
“That’s what she said, Barnum,” Levi said.
Levi never called him Barnum unless he was upset. He’d been halfway to agreeing until the Heth business came up. Now Barnum was going to have to soothe the other man down so he’d go to Maine and collect this woman they were arguing about. Except they weren’t really arguing about the mermaid. They were arguing about the past. Barnum wasn’t interested in revisiting the past. The past was the past, and only the future could bring profit.
“Levi—”
“I was the one who was with her all day, Barnum. Not you. You didn’t hear her.”
Barnum nodded. He had heard her, heard those very words, but he acknowledged that Levi had taken the worst of it. Barnum’s part had been to drum up business—put advertisements in the papers, sell tickets. Levi had accompanied the woman to every town and every stage, been the public face of the business, as it were. “If you go now and do this for me, I promise that I’ll give the woman a fair contract.”
Levi narrowed his eyes. “She’ll be paid? And permitted to leave if she chooses?”
Barnum privately thought that if the woman was really a mermaid—not likely, as Levi had said, but there was always hope—she wouldn’t be going anywhere. There wasn’t a chance in heaven or hell that Barnum would let something like that go once he had it. But he was careful not to let this show on his face as he answered his old friend.
“Of course, Levi. Anything you want.”
Levi didn’t like the ocean. At least, he thought he might like a tropical ocean—those oceans described in travelogues and seen in pictures of faraway islands with golden sand and palm trees.
As a child he’d imagined living on an island like Robinson Crusoe, complete with a parrot and a native servant. Of course, Robinson Crusoe had to contend with cannibals, and Levi didn’t think he was up to dealing with those kinds of problems. He had enough trouble with Barnum and his schemes.
The churning, cold green of the North Atlantic was not at all to his taste—nor, he reflected as his insides swooned about queasily, was it preferred by his stomach.
Barnum had insisted that a boat was more efficient for his purposes—if there really was a mermaid in Maine, then he wanted Levi to get her and bring her back to New York posthaste, and the patchwork of dirt roads leading through northern Maine did not lend itself to quickness.
However, there wasn’t a passenger boat from Boston to this obscure little town. Levi had taken a steamer to Rhode Island and then a train to Boston and now a horrible fish-smelling craft heading north to draw its trade from the seas. There was ice and crashing waves, and Levi wondered why on earth anyone would fish so early in the season, but Barnum had managed to find one crew of madmen, and the captain of these madmen had consented to take a passenger.
The fishermen on board laughed at his city shoes and inadequate coat and the way he turned up his nose at the hardtack for breakfast. Levi wanted badly to reach a place that had a feather bed that didn’t rock from side to side and all the whiskey he could drink.
But Barnum wanted a mermaid, so Levi was going to get him a mermaid.
Once upon a time, Levi thought he could have fame and fortune, that his life would be better, more glamorous, more exciting if he helped Barnum sell his humbugs to the public. Barnum was an old friend, and he’d convinced Levi that playing the showman was a lot like playing the lawyer, only more fun. He’d get to convince folks of a different kind of truth—an actor’s truth, a storyteller’s truth—rather than dig out the truth in a courtroom. And Levi had been dissatisfied with his quiet life and thought it would be a lark to go along with Barnum for a while.
The shine had long since come off the work for Levi, but he didn’t much fancy going back to lawyering either. So he stayed and hoped that maybe he could find some of that magic again, the magic he had felt when he first started. And even if he couldn’t, then maybe he could stop Barnum from hurting someone else the way they had hurt Joice Heth. If Levi did that, even without the fame and fortune, it would be worth staying.
He didn’t believe in the mermaid story, of course, and he didn’t really think Barnum did, either. But Barnum was smart enough to know that if there were rumors about this woman, it would lend veracity to any tale they told once she was on exhibit. If a poking New York reporter decided to make this miserable journey to the north, then he would find the same stories that had drawn Levi there, and nobody would be able to prove the girl wasn’t a mermaid.
That was the trick, really—making sure nobody could prove what Barnum said wasn’t true. They were free to raise objections and make conjectures, but without proof . . . well, without proof every person who claimed the mermaid was false would just be giving Barnum free advertising.
Levi knew Barnum hadn’t liked the way people turned on him about the Heth woman, despite all of his bluster otherwise. For himself, Levi had never been able to feel entirely comfortable about the business. It had started off fun and quickly soured when he realized that Joice Heth didn’t want to be displayed like a dancing bear for the rest of her days. He’d tried his best to keep the old woman content, and surely he and Barnum had done a better job of it than her owner in the South.
But the truth was that Barnum had paid to put that woman on display, and paying for her made Barnum—whatever he might say—her owner, too. Levi didn’t know how he felt about slavery in the South, but he knew he didn’t feel so good about it when it was standing next to him.
Whatever the truth of this widow on the rocks (as Levi had come to think of her), he wouldn’t force her to return to New York if she didn’t want to go. He’d had enough of forcing people to do things they didn’t want to do just because Barnum said so.
And Levi would see that Barnum gave the girl fair pay for her work. It was her body people would be gaping at in the tank, after all. Barnum forgot about things like that sometimes. He saw every person passing as a potential coin in his pocket.
It never occurred to Levi, while contemplating his sea-borne misery and righteously demanding her compensation from Barnum in his mind, that the woman might not want to leave her home. He’d told Barnum that he would leave her in Maine if she truly didn’t want to come, but down deep he didn’t think she would refuse.
Of course there was no place more wonderful than New York City in all the world (Europe could keep their London and Paris), and any person would be thrilled to leave their country life to go there—especially if they had a free ticket and a job waiting. That was how Barnum had lured him away from Pennsylvania in the first place.
Levi was pretty certain that the woman wouldn’t turn down the chance to get away from the middle of nowhere. Everyone wanted to be someone, and how could you be someone when you lived in a cottage on the rocks by the sea?
But when Levi finally made it to the mermaid’s village, he discovered that the people there were carved from stone. Their faces looked like leather, and their accents made sounds he didn’t understand. They didn’t know anything about this woman he spoke of, and they weren’t interested in knowing. They narrowed their eyes in suspicion, and his money wasn’t good anywhere.
It was clear, overwhelmingly clear, that they had no use for him and did not want him and would do everything in their damned Yankee souls to drive him away before he reached his object.