August 5, 1923

By the time Ruth settled in, she had already had enough. She smiled, nevertheless, and greeted him with taut lips.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Woods.”

Kenneth quit jostling de Lila’s hand and returned to the table. Scarlet lozenged socks peeked out from herringbone trousers as the magnate sat and crossed his legs.

“Lovely in the day, Ms. Nickels,” he boomed, overly jovial. The other diners looked or looked away. “ And in such proximity! I had ascribed your fair aspect to the lighting and costumes, but now I see it must be the stage makeup. You have quite the steady wrist.”

Ruth made an indulgent crooning noise—It’s my natural skin, we’re not all gypsies, you dolt—and scanned the women at the next table. Pouting rouged lips and gothic doe eyes popped from faces chalked to porcelain. One of them was still buttering her nose with a pan stick, over the hors d’oeuvres! Ruth figured herself lucky. She had only to maquillage for the show, but two hours a night. Outside the ring, she was herself.

“What’s funny,” she rejoined, “is that I’m just as steady with a ledger.”

His argyle foot lolled like a leopard’s tail. “How handy you are.”

Ruth knuckled the clutch in her lap, nails hissing under black rayon gloves. Her husband Keith would not have stood for this man. She caught de Lila’s dimples twitch. A trio of bachelors did, too. They sniggered behind their cigarettes. Mulatto wafted through the smoke.

At least it wasn’t gypsy.

The waiter appeared, poured some tea, and left.

“I spoke with Ms. Nickels yesterday evening,” Kenneth said, plopping sugar cubes into his cup. “We came to a rather lucrative arrangement, wherein—to speak comprehensibly—she sold me the circus.”

Ruth’s lips stretched thin. “Your enthusiasm delights. But Samantha and I are partners, Mr. Woods, and when she consulted me over your proposal, I comprehended a few vital provisions on our part vis-à-vis any potential transferal of ownership. I pray your memory hasn’t failed you those.”

His foot stilled. “I am pleased that Ms. Nickels has cultured such friendly confidence in her helpers, however, I would be rude to talk of business in her absence.”

“A true cavalier. But Samantha has entrusted her affairs to me, as she’s presently occupied with preparations for our new act.”

Kenneth leaned forward, eyes glinting green chrome. “New act?”

Ruth glanced de Lila’s way. “With her daughter, Joyce. We thought to open this season with—”

“WONDERFUL!” Kenneth slapped the table, quaking the beverages. “I’ve got my own ideas as it happens. I’ll have Samantha to dinner at once. Won’t you tell her? I’ll have a car sent at eight, or do you folks eat at the witching hour?”

The salads arrived. Roasted pecans, raspberries, braised pork, vinaigrette. A gentleman with geometric cufflinks voiced The Sheik of Araby on a lounge piano. The argyle foot bobbed to the tempo, its owner dreaming up new capers while his guest scanned her crowd.

The club glistened like condensation would on champagne flukes. Women promenaded in tea gowns with sashed hips and pearl garlands, hair bobbed and banded in feathers and mesh. Their girls wore pipeline dresses with matching column earrings, lace gauntlet gloves, and cloche hats covered in butterfly bows. Everywhere arms rattled with wood or bone bracelets. Pastel hosiery and silk parasols twirled over the first tee like an airborne garden.

Who needed the circus?

Ruth studied her own dress—black cotton, rayon stockings. A red lucite bib was her only accessory, aside from the wool cloche under which her dark hair was carefully spooled.

She should be grateful, she thought, to sit at the magnate’s table. And the troupe needed the money.

If only he weren’t such a nincompoop.

When the waiters returned, replacing dish for dish, Ruth toasted Kenneth. “As you may know,” she said, “we have received several investment requests since opening our Providence exhibition. But we’re looking for partnership, to settle and expand.” She lifted her glass. “Samantha and I look forward to signing. What do you say to Nickels & Woods’ Guild of Grotesqueries?”

Now Keith would never have stood for that.

But the dead made faint objections.

Kenneth clinked her glass, grinning. His halogen gaze lingered on de Lila as The Sheik ended.

August 2, 1923

“And Dot!” she called, “Have my hose pressed for lunch tomorrow.”

The door snicked shut and Mary Baltazar returned to her boudoir—her version of a boudoir, anyhow—a vanity station with china candelabra and a circular mirror that projected her flaws like an all-knowing oculus.

Muttering, she topped off her cheeks with two burning rouge patches and ran her finger this way and that along a row of lipsticks. “Now Maxine likes to be the bell, but Minnie likes a spectacle. Except she wouldn’t have any rivals while Harvey’s with us. But I can’t be a pale fish and wear nothing—and how silly am I!”

She had contemplated her outfit for the past hour: peach dress with sequin pinstripes, stack of ebony bracelets, onyx-in-filigree studs. She had asked Dot to groom her hair in a faux bob and, puffing it, clasped a collar round her neck and slipped into a set of patent tangos for a modest Wednesday afternoon.

She waited in the study. Calligraphied ledgers with waterlogged spines overlooked the great mahogany desk where her father, Clarence Baltazar, idled red and giggly.

He twisted his cigar into the crystal tray. “Mary!” he cried, fanning bills in the air. “Don’t be shy, now. Dot told me you’d be at the plaza with your girlfriends. I want you to buy whatever you like, and don’t pretend frugality with me.”

Mrs. Baltazar perched on the loveseat opposite him, swirling her orange pekoe. “Take the money, Mary, and get a proper hat. I hate to see you in that dreadful mohair thing. A black silk one would do. To contrast your hair, bring out the lighter tones.”

Mary stuffed the bills in her purse without counting. She’d rather wander the wharfs than play ugly duckling. But these outings were practice, as her mother said.

How dull the sport must be.

“You girls behave!” cried Mrs. Baltazar. “And say hullo to the Sawyers for me.”

The horn of the Rolls Royce yowled outside. Mary hurried to the drive.

Later:

GUILD.

Massive letters ignited the hillside. Both suburb- and cityfolk would squint through the dusk and know it was time, the invitation unmistakable, alive, even. It spat and flared unlike other marquees. For, instead of manmade bulbs, they had lined the field with steel potted bonfires. At regular intervals Payaso or John Coleman fed them aluminum powder to bleach the flames’ natural coloring. The name of the circus would blaze stark white against the night.

Above the hillside stood the tent. One might mistake it for a contemporary church, a lone white spire with guy wires for buttresses. Gold chiffon ribbed the interior, with sideshow tents and tarped wagons flocking the cone, a city proper.

“Set them higher!” cried Evelyn. “Let the risers seesaw. Keep the crowd dizzied even in blackout.”

“Nix the rider,” Ruth called, pacing the backstage padrooms. “Leave the seating to me. Not all our patrons have a stuntman’s spirit. Now fetch your friends. The horses are groomed and tacked. You’re on after Anatoli checks the rigs.”

Evelyn scampered off, leaving the bookkeeper to her business.

Ruth shouldered down the gangplanked wings, mud squishing between the beams, while leotarded dancers and acrobats scurried past her for their rostered entrances, wheeling hoops, metal balls, and miscellaneous widgets toward the thunder of de Lila’s bullwhip. The ringmaster was barking commands between microphone checks, a confusion of Spanglish and calliope.

“Ruth!”

She snapped to. Breaking the shadows between sconces, Samantha Nickels materialized in her costume tailcoat. A Victorian corset, pinstripe top hat, and gold-bossed cane finished her stagehand charade. Only insiders knew the woman behind as proprietor and mistress. For rectitude’s sake, de Lila headed the troupe, but Samantha was the brain and rod.

She bid Ruth follow her down the alley. The bookkeeper obeyed, bracing her nose for the stink of the cages ahead.

“You seen Cox?” asked Samantha.

The bookkeeper snorted. “He said the preview was a hit. Even the gentleman bachelors were fighting for flyers, though I wouldn’t put some healthy hyperbole past the kid.”

Sam tossed her fiery curls over one shoulder. By far the most costly prop on the books, glossy horsehair extensions dyed crimson and curled. But the look was the circus and the circus the look.

She glanced sidelong at Ruth. “We can’t afford another empty tent.”

The bookkeeper glowered. “Anatoli and I have worked a rotation. Every night brings a new spectacular to encourage regulars. I’ve scouted regional talent for sideshow options, even networked animal traders, costume vendors—”

“All good. The Nickels name won’t stand for anything less.”

“I know.”

Even after Oklahoma—especially after Oklahoma—she hadn’t given it up. Ruth Nickels, to the grave.

They entered the tamer’s quarters, the Lion’s Den as de Lila put it.

“I upped the cats’ rations. Just another pound for today. Put that in your notes.”

A stagehand passed Ruth a runny bucket. Eyes watering, she took it to the cages and shoveled red beef slabs into the metal trays. “They don’t need it,” she said, “we can’t afford it, and it won’t make them any smarter.”

She had to shout as the cats grumbled and slammed their bars in their frenzy to eat.

“Just a snacking portion,” Sam insisted, “to make them docile. Sphinx and Shiva have taken a fancy to the same seat in de Lila’s routine. They spent all this morning hissing and clawing.”

Ruth wiped her hands. The cats seldom misbehaved. The handlers kept constant eyes on them, for if one lion strayed, the others followed. The routine would break, the pit band fluster, the audience panic as de Lila fought for control with but a prop whip to chasten a half dozen yawning jaws.

Ruth shuddered at the prospect. “I wouldn’t meddle, Sam. De Lila won’t like it.”

“And what, quit? Make a handsome dog trainer for all I care, but he’d miss the troupe. None of us are alive outside the ring.”

“If he pulls out, so do the cats.”

Sam flinched at that. Gratified, Ruth approached Sekhmet’s cage and shoved the meat-laden tray through the feed slot. A tar-lipped muzzle with saber teeth came to collect, devouring her meal and slurping the bars afterward. The tigers adjacent growled for their share. Ruth slid the rest their pans, which skittered and crunched upon delivery as if fed to the grinder. It was good, she supposed, it was what folks wanted. Freaks, glitz, and carnivores.

“By the way,” she said, “have you seen Joyce?”

Samantha nodded her cane down the wing they’d come. “Dressing room.”

Tails and red noses rattled the cages as she and Ruth left. They wound back toward the ring and, crossing the pit, cut under the bleachers toward the network of alleys on the other side of the tent. They walked upright and easily under the risers; the stagehands had steepened the tiers with altitude for a fishbowl effect. Every patron would see the performers. And the performers them.

As the Nickels girls passed, Howard stood in the arena, gesticulating wildly at one of his elephants. He scolded the beast for sulking off mark, then whirled on its rider, a plumed dancer whose sari was sequined to obscenity, for the untantric-ness of her pose atop the elephant’s head. Contortionists in black body suits practiced group adagio to the side, bending into fantastic shapes. Ruth had hired them in June. Two months they’d been with the caravan, and still she gagged when they practiced, splaying and skewing themselves like wax dolls held to flame. But it didn’t top the old anxiety, her constant unease, at the animals. She never quite squared with the fact that purebred African baboons and hyenas lurked in wagons outside, within earshot and spitting distance. She and Keith once relished the creatures’ cooing, almost infantile in the night, but now she likened their whines to violins before concert. To premonition.

Joyce sat crosslegged on the hearthrug when her mother and sister-in-law came in. Her cheek-high bob was hid wisely under a towel turban. She’d gotten poor Evelyn to crop her famous waves in the name of The Theatre, claiming that true Egyptians razored their heads down to glittering scalps—that a bob, by comparison, was both stylish and prudent. But Ruth knew a petulant whim anywhere. Sam did too, and threatened to revive the Hercules act and make Joyce prance the stage, a bald dryad.

“Hi Ruth,” she nodded. “Mom.” A kingsnake hitched her fist in oily rings of red, black, and yellow. What might have doubled as a woman’s necklace, but fanged.

Sam gasped when she saw the girl’s face. “No hair, no makeup…You’re not even dressed! If de Lila found you in this pigpen, he’d feed your hide to Pharaoh.”

Chalk sticks, powder tins, sponges, and tweezers littered the bulbed vanity dresser. Sam inspected a brush with congealed bristles and chucked it.

Joyce stowed her pet in its tank, where an indeterminate number of its kind roved like marbles possessed, and retreated to the dresser, swabbing her eyelids with cream and dusting on the malachite.

“I’d have started with the bronzer,” Samantha remarked, kneeling by the wigstand.

Joyce ran a fine, flat brush through a palette of kohl and traced her lash line. “I know how to do it, Mother.”

Sam muttered, “Uh-huh,” and teased straight the matted black hairs, braiding turquois and bronze beads into the wig. Glossing the bangs with beeswax, Sam looked to Ruth. “How about that?”

“Let’s see it on.”

They lowered the wig onto Joyce’s head. Sam bolted it in place with a bronze forehead circlet, its lapis cobra rearing between the girl’s brows. Charcoal ankhs inscribed her eyes, which shone in feline greens and golds.

A stab of nostalgia rocked the bookkeeper. She steadied herself on the chairback. “You look like your mother,” she said. A ghost of your mother.

“You’re ready.”

Earlier

They whizzed through the red. “You’ll kill someone!” squealed Maxine.

Minnie chucked Harvey’s nose with the tip of her stole. “Don’t be such a bluenose, Max. This is how men drive.”

The tycoon smirked. Minnie’s birthstone rings dazzled and played like a motion picture on his baby-close shave. He was handsome, thought Mary, in a faceless way, proportioned like any fine statue in a cemetery.

“Bluenose? Psh. That’s Mary’s job.” Maxine inspected her nails, a red and black moon manicure. “You’re still back there?”

Mary whiplashed against the window as the Rolls Royce careered between lanes. She rubbed her neck, wincing under a lemony smile. Well, she thought. I’ve sported sufficiently for the day. That is, playing along while the Sawyer twins slouched boyishly in their flat silks and knife pleats. Feathered headbands—what Maxine christened the bandeau with a rather severe pucker of lip—cinched their kittenish yellow bobs. Minnie wore green stockings with oriental dragons, Maxine pink with butterflies. Both rolled below the knee, gartered assertively, and neither bunched at the ankles like Mary’s tended to.

Minnie leaned over and batted her sister with an alligator clutch. Maxine retaliated with her own beaded accessory. The two giggled.

“Mary, join us,” Maxine laughed as Harvey swerved past the haberdashery.

Mary studied her coinpurse. She considered graciously swinging it.

“Don’t bother her, Max. She’s got her little fortune in there.”

“The Baltazar fortune,” Harvey mused. “No small thing.”

Minnie tucked her hair behind one ear. Diamonds winked on it like pixies—diamonds, thought Mary, the gall!

“Don’t be tacky, dear,” said Min. “Let’s not speak of money.”

“I’d love to hit the town toting my own piggybank,” Maxine volunteered. “What a symphony I’d make. Though I think these,” she said, twiddling her bangles—African zigzags etched in shell—“make noise enough. What a racket I am! Lucky that Daddy’s well known, or else we’d have whole banks to carry and deafen all of Providence.”

“Oh, shut up,” Minnie said just as the car slowed to a stop. They had gridlocked by the wharf. Minnie squinted through the sunlit windshield at a gathering crowd ahead. “Look.”

Harvey lurched to the curb. Minnie barged onto the walk, flipping a tasseled sautoir over her shoulders. Maxine sulked behind, sporting her own, a white sphinx cameo down her spine. Mary blushed for the two and got out.

They followed the pedestrians along the docks to find a boy, maybe thirteen, perched high on an old shipping crate, guarding behind him a curiously shrouded wagon. The white gossamer veil, in the windless afternoon, seemed to swish of its own accord.

The crowd pressed to hear him.

“Step here, that’s it! Have you, madam, wondered after the bond between man and animal? Have you, sir, dreamed of the mystery of flight? Glut your curiosities at Nickels’ Guild of Grotesqueries! Witness the kennel of the gods, a menagerie of creatures from the wilds of the world! Treat your ’noculars to aerial acts and animal taming, to human and bestial marvels!”

The veil blew off. The onlookers gasped.

Mary peered between her fingers at the exposed wagon, which she now saw was a cage on wheels. Something hulked inside, frame to frame, hardly discernible in the shade.

“Come out!” cried the boy. “Into the day!”

The creature roused, rocking the wagon with its bulk. What looked like numerous limbs crimped and twitched into focus. Slowly, a pair of black feelers curled around the bars, breaking the sunlight, drawing the onlookers, and—snap! snap!

They were pincers.

“The Goliath of Arachnida,” whispered the boy, spreading his arms.

Mary bit her lip and watched the spider click and squirm. Daddy long legs was a mite compared to this thing. It had flesh and fur, maybe bones. It was ghastly and vile.

Several onlookers hurried away, but Mary wouldn’t have left for the world. She craned forward for a better look—

“Fraud!”

A man was pointing from the crowd. “That thing’s not real!”

“What?” The boy wrinkled his nose and turned to the cage. “Are you not the Goliath of Arachnida?!”

The spider bristled—indignantly, if Mary believed her eyes. As the crowd deliberated, the monster hissed and tensed, rearing back as if to blow out its cage—

The boy bellowed, “Begone, poseur!”

The spider crumpled and quartered. Unraveling in vague black figures that separated, gathered, and rose again.

Four acrobats bowed from within the cage.

The crowd erupted in cheers. Mary clapped with them, laughing at her own silly suspense, but jumped again at Maxine’s shriek: “Look there!”

The boy grinned atop his crate as furry legs shinnied up the back of his neck. He beamed theatrically as the biggest tarantula Mary ever saw came to squat like a mohair bowler on his head. “The Goliath of Arachnida,” he repeated.

Behind him the white veil fluttered back over the cage. Only this time the material appeared crosshatched—quilted, perhaps, made of fine satin squares.

One of the squares peeled off. A man, recalled by many as the same naysayer who’d cried fraud, came forward and touched it.

The squares dropped like leaves to the cobblestones, exposing the wagon.

It was empty. The boy was gone too. Only the white squares remained, sifting in the sea breeze.

The crowd converged on the spot. Minnie pulled Harvey into the fray and emerged minutes later breathless, waving one of the squares triumphantly. Silver print shined discreetly on the underside. An address. Postscript,

“Midnight.”

Midnight, August 2, 1923

Spectators of all classes and kinds wobbled up the risers. Women alternated between pajama suits and flapper shifts, grosgrain versus silk, while the men bore their standards by facial grooming. Opera glasses twinkled under newsies and trimmed felt helmets alike. All vied for the first glimpse of the show.

A few curious elites sprinkled between the bachelors and businesspeople—Minnie and Maxine Sawyer included. Harvey escorted them, plus Shirley Razner, the veteran’s daughter.

The torches snuffed, suspending all in darkness save a sliver of moonlight that leaked through the eye of the tent, catching the center flagpole like a giant needle. The microphone fizzled. “Ladies and gentleman,” came a sleek, androgynous voice, “Our ensemble would like to welcome you to the Guild.”

A spotlight switched on a tuxedoed man in the middle of the ring. He barked orders in harsh German cadences that warped and ricocheted, unintelligible in the acoustics, though one English phrase echoed over the rest:

Gyroscope.

The light dilated about him, widening, catching a spherical contraption in the background. Concentric rings pivoted about a common axis. The crowd mumbled broodingly as each layer swiveled faster. The lights flared in full.

Tumblers. The cogs and junctures of the machine were people. Vaguely humanoid figures, contracting and expanding in elastic layers like a convulsing molecule. They swung faster and faster until they spiraled out of orbit, flying beyond the confines of spotlight.

The German remained, alone as he’d started. He surveyed the expectant audience and, after a tantalizing lull, signaled the torches.

The ring lit in full.

The acrobats hung frozen overhead. Like flies in a web, they suspended from all but invisible trapezes, stories above safety. At the German’s command, they set to motion once more. The audience whooped as they frisked and launched over the bleachers and higher still, into scarlet sashes that unfurled from the top of the flagpole.

The acrobats wound around the pole like tetherballs, wrapping close and upward, and one by one leaped through the eye of the tent itself, into the open night.

The sashes fluttered down like crepe streamers, empty.

All were stupefied.

A murmur of applause broke the bottom tier.

It ripped up the stands, a thunder, as the crowd’s gaze settled back to the ground, where the sashes should have settled flat but instead writhed.

Minnie crushed Harvey’s glasses to her eyeballs.

The sashes rolled and broke, the acrobats crawling from them like crocodiles in quagmire.

Act One ended in maniacal cheers as the acrobats rose, bowed, and exited.

Then came the thunder of hooves.

Three slender Arabians loped through the dark, one short of Revelation. The riders swung like pommel gymnasts through daring saddle positions and halted center ring, the stallions rearing like trophies, forelegs kicking, nostrils steaming. When they leveled on all fours, the riders gazed into the audience. They were kids, perhaps the flyer boy’s siblings.

Except the middle one. Shirley Razner’s nose scrunched. A darky.

After balancing stunts and flaming hurdles, they rode off.

Then came the real animals. Hennaed elephants with gilt tusks, dyed toes, and flappy pig’s ears trundled onstage, linked trunk to tail in a bestial conga line. They wore gold headdresses and, on their backs, rugs that depicted tea-picking monkeys.

At the handler’s instruction, they lumbered through headstands and line dancing routines while brilliantined showgirls rode their shoulders.

The Guild closed at dawn. Lights out, no curtain call or credits. The ring looked cold, acrobats and wranglers now ghosts, perhaps fantasies, as the crowd filed out. It had seemed only an hour, but the night was gone. They now squinted into the sun, slow to leave the circus and resume their lives. Many milled about the lawn, picking listlessly through the trolleys of oranges and marinated popcorn, the wagons of animal skin goods and strange textiles.

Harvey bought Minnie a bag of caramel corn that tasted of plums.

She ’phoned the Baltazars as soon as she got home. “You have to see it!”

“Hmmm?” Mary mumbled. She stood in her nightgown in the study, Dot watching her curiously. It was barely seven.

“The GUILD, silly. Harvey took us last night. Everyone from the plaza was there and, while I didn’t relish the rabble, you wouldn’t mind. Oh, it was a sensation!”

“Hmmm.”

Minnie giggled. “Get your old man to take you. Tomorrow night. A real prince’s gonna be there. The ringmaster said so.”

“What do you mean?” Mary asked, cupping close the receiver.

“A pharaoh. A real pharaoh. Fancy what that means.”

August 3, 1923

Corked between her father and Uncle Kenneth, Mary clutched and folded her program to a pulp. The bleachers behind her swarmed. “I’m not for sticking around,” Kenneth murmured in her ear, flicking imagined germs from his jacket. “Let’s see how the first act goes.”

“It’s the circus,” cried Clarence. “Even you can find something to laugh at.”

Kenneth crushed a stray popcorn kernel under his buffed brogue heel, answer enough.

The lights went down. Mary’s pulse spiked as the tent gushed with the breath of multitudes.

“Ladies and gentlemen. Here to induct you to the Guild, our feline familiars.”

Lights up on a caged ring. Scarlet curtains finished the circumference, trimming the enclosure from the ground up three feet like a wraparound dust ruffle, concealing the floor from view. Inside stood six empty risers arranged in semicircle, each a yard square in surface area but varying by height—shortest on the sides, highest in center—a pyramid.

The curtains rustled and parted to reveal six golden scalps, followed by sleek rolling shoulders and broad muzzles. Not until the cats sprang up their respective risers did the crowd see them in full. Three lionesses, two tigers, and one sovereign lion.

Their whiskers twitched as a man in a red tuxedo sauntered into the cage, a whip in each hand. He waved them alternatingly over the cats’ noses. They nipped and nodded at the finepoint tips. With a flick of either wrist, the man signaled the cats to their hind legs, their claws unsheathed, raised for all to see.

Mary dropped her glasses, spellbound.

To think she had ever marveled over Minnie’s wardrobe, while this man ordered lions like mice! Her guts curled on themselves as if bashful of her own meekness. She’d never thought much on her future—imagined wedding and fading—but the bronze mandibles and green-disked eyes before her urged something greater.

At the next of whips, and the cats roared.

Mary jumped to her feet. The sound struck her like a cavernous rumble, a tombstone opening. Her lungs buzzed off its palpable frequency, and she almost howled along with it.

Even Kenneth clapped.

Then the ringmaster climbed up the back of the lion’s riser and straddled Pharaoh, plunging into tufts of mane, daring the audience to protest his audacity. They must not have yelled loud enough, for to their astonishment, he pulled the lion’s yawning mouth over his face.

Mary crushed her father’s hand. The bruises would later testify to how long de Lila braved the lion’s throat.

Wet and dimpled, he finally emerged and whispered into Pharaoh’s ear. The cat stood on command, bearing the ringmaster’s weight. Together they jumped from the riser and lapped the enclosure, a man and his fanged Hidalgo.

When the man dismounted and bowed before the frenzied spectators, the other cats joined him. They nuzzled into his open arms, lapping and grumbling, seeming to overtake him. A curtain deployed from above the cage, swirling over the gold velvet heap and settling flat on the floor, the man and his pets having vanished. The act was over.

Mary bounced on her feet, straining to catch a glimpse of the ringmaster, wherever he was. She would have stayed for his final bow, but a gruff hand seized her arm.

“Hey!”

“Quiet, girl.”

Mary shut up as Kenneth towed her toward the exit and, ducking past an usher, veered down a Circus-Only alley. Ranging the sloped canvas corridors were performers Mary recognized. They seemed small and unremarkable outside the spotlight; they could’ve been her cousins from Seekonk.

Nosing like a shark through the network of wardrobes, Kenneth steered Mary into the very hearth of the corsetted woman from the ticket booth.

“How much?” he panted.

Wrapping her robe tighter about her, the woman pointed her cane at him as a sniper would his target. “Performers only. Out!”

Kenneth advanced, Mary burning behind him. She tried to amend his strange rudeness with groveling eyes, but her attention soon gravitated toward a trove of curios in the corner of the dressing room. Among them, a crystal ball that reflected her back as a swirling deformity.

“I get it—” Kenneth was saying, waving his hands—“You’re a family business. But I have resources. Tell me what you want, and I’ll buy you out.”

“De Lila!” called the woman. “This is my troupe, sir. Not a freak show! Now kindly leave before I throw you out.”

Mary gaped as Kenneth turned out his pockets and showered the floorboards in bills. Gamblers, launderers, bosses… no one carried that volume of green on person.

She watched her uncle this time, chilled.

“Kenneth Woods, Baltazar & Woods Steel, at your service, Madame.”

The woman lowered her cane when an olive-toned man burst into the wardrobe. “What is it Samantha? What’s the meaning of this?”

Mary blushed to recognize the ringmaster himself, presently seizing up her uncle, advancing, and—

“Wait.”

The woman detained him, muttering something in his ear. His eyes slid onto Mary. He smiled sweetly. “I beg you pardon my brusqueness, Miss. Let me introduce myself—but, I’m afraid I’m rather a bore. How would you like to meet a real pharaoh? Let’s walk, shall we?”

Her pulse thrummed as he offered his arm. These people—wranglers of jungle predators, aerialists who flew—they were demigods. And she, plain and green and undeserving, was with them.

Yet she glanced over shoulder as de Lila escorted her out, doubtful of Kenneth’s dead-of-night resolve and any resulting negotiations. Surely this kind of business was unusual.

Midnight, August 5, 1923

Ruth squared off her wig. She wore a net of faience beads, her hands hennaed, feet dusted gold. With broad collar and belt, her getup reeked of old Egypt, as opposed to the Ptolemies’ reign millennia later. But accuracy didn’t grip an audience. Glitz did.

The Cleopatra act was Samantha’s signature. She’d been a showgirl out West before signing with her late husband’s menagerie. The Nickels name swelled as she coupled his access to rare specimen with her taste for spectacle in tableaus of past monarchs and legends, from the Antionettes to the titans.

Ruth saw her as Cleopatra in Fort Lauderdale and, electrified, begged her way into the troupe. An amateur dancer with grand ambitions, she debuted as Charmion, the pharaoh queen’s handmaiden.

She played the part a thousand times, both in and out of Sam’s arena.

And why? she thought to herself as she padded through the blackout in her gladiator sandals—foot thongs with gold foil cross garters.

She hated showmanship, the overmuch and excess, the spectator’s snigger and the performer’s mania for it. But her alternative was the true grotesquerie: office bunny for life. Ironic how she could parlay a dance career into managership, while a secretariat was its own pit and penthouse. Those safer professions, all dead ends.

She had opted for something less respectable, where she could wriggle to the top and plant her own flag. She missed the city—its scalloped horizons, skylines like origami—but the outskirts were hers. Her private domain, her masculine authority, her name on the playbill.

No investor, no Kenneth, would compromise that.

She crept to the bier in the middle of the ring, squeezing Joyce’s shoulder. The girl’s skin was pimpled with cold as she laid waiting for the music.

The tableau lit up. Trumpets, hide drums, and violins crescendoed. Ruth danced.

In the original act, Sam would blaze onstage alone, fleshing out Cleopatra’s suicide in otherworldly choreography to a rapt audience. Now the people wanted extravagance—now, her daughter faced the tiers in wig and vulture diadem, sheer linens, and bakelite costume jewels. The set reimagined the Ptolemies’ mausoleum: obelisks, trinkets, frescoes of strange mutt men. Here Cleopatra and her ladies had locked themselves from the conquerer Octavian. Like samurai they chose suicide over submission.

As background dancers in Roman battle dress sparred upstage, Ruth locked fingers with Joyce. Cleopatra and Charmion. They waltzed the set in a mock pas de deux, lilting in each other’s arms to the audience’s mirth.

Joyce basked in their attention. Ruth was unthawed.

In her last move, she dipped her queen in a stunning backbend and retreated to the shadows while Joyce stayed doubled, fingers outstretched. Wolf whistles and cheers erupted as the girl’s trusty kingsnake slithered across the floor and up her arm, the first of many as the set seemed to crawl and slither.

The ring exploded. Dancers jumped from sarcophagi while acrobats in red-trimmed helmets dropped from the sky, shooting tinsel arrows to bursts of trumpet. And there was Joyce, unmoving in the melee, skin roving in snakes.

The lighting reddened as the fat, coal-black asp crept down Cleopatra’s neck.

From her vantage backstage, Ruth watched Kenneth in Row One.

He frowned as Cleopatra fainted over her bed of snakes. It was enchanting, yes, but was it enough?

His eyes gleamed like vermin in the dark, craving a bigger cheese wheel.