The Transformation of Bartholomew Fortuno: A Novel (33 page)

Mention of another man took a little breath from me. “Are you being courted? By whom?”

“Oh, believe me, I’ve no one so intriguing in my life as you do in yours.”

The carriage hit a pothole, and her bonnet bounced sideways. We rode in uncomfortable silence.

“I would at least like to know what you see in her,” she said at last.

My palms dampened. “What I see in whom?”

“I know all about you and Iell Adams, Barthy. Everyone does. Though no one can understand the attraction. I thought the photographs might show you the truth, but clearly she’s bewitched you.”

I ached to lean across the seat and rest my head on Matina’s bosom. Tell her it was all a lie. But she wanted answers. It was the least that I could give her.

“You and I, we have cared about each other for a long time,” I said carefully.

Matina looked over at me, her shoulders tightening. “But you prefer her. Is it because she’s so thin?”

“Goodness sakes, no!
Nothing
like that.” I slid across the carriage seat toward her. “She’s just . . . amazing: intelligent, witty, not like anyone I’ve ever met. When I’m with her, Matina, no one else exists.”

“How nice for you.”

“Please. Don’t take it the wrong way.”

“It’s fine, Barthy. Really.”

The carriage slowed to a halt. Matina turned from me and didn’t move for what seemed like forever. Then she straightened her bonnet and gathered her things. She allowed me to help her from the carriage, but she refused to walk with me once we entered the Ann Street door.

“I think I’ll take myself up to bed now,” she said. “I’m sure you’d be happier down here in the garden for a while.”

Dutifully, I sat on a garden bench for ten minutes or so—long enough for Matina to make the climb upstairs alone—as, above me, gray clouds tumbled in, covering the stars one by one. I’d hurt her, I knew that. I hadn’t meant to be cruel. But even the mention of Iell’s name sent me into an enraptured state. I tried to dismiss a feeling of discomfort as I walked up the stairs to my room, but I didn’t worry long. When I pushed open the door to my rooms, a note lay on the floor. Sometime while we’d been gone, Iell had sent a message asking if we could meet at her boardinghouse the next morning. She also wrote that, if the bad news I warned about had anything to do with her, I wasn’t to worry.

Wasn’t to worry, indeed.

T
HE NEXT MORNING
, I
WAS SO NERVOUS ABOUT
the impending visit to Iell I barely cared that my name still did not appear in the weekly notices. Even Bridgett’s noisy entrance into the Green Room—she wore bells that she’d sewn into the hem of her skirt—barely struck a nerve. She looked particularly pleased with herself as she chimed her way through a group of workers and headed to where Alley sat, changing his shirt for the first set of shows. When she cozied up next to him and fussed maternally with the ends of his collar, he looked toward me for help. I shrugged my shoulders. What could I do? Even though we’d a bit more than a week before the party, Fish had insisted that we consolidate our dressing room space for the acts that would join us. He’d put Alley and Bridgett together on one mirror. Alley would have to make do.

Temporary name plaques listing the incoming dignitaries already hung above each mirror. No one wanted to sit next to Signor Fuego the Fire Fiend—rumor had it that a stagehand with two buckets of water would follow him everywhere he went—so some of the regulars tripled up next to John Mulligan, the six-foot Ethiopian minstrel, and the clog dancer Joe Child. Others drew straws to sit next to Dan Rice, the clown whose picture already hung at the top of my old mirror. According to the plaques, I was to sit with Ricardo. That had to be Mrs. Barnum’s doing. What better way to keep an eye on me than to pair me with one of her henchmen. Well, I would see about that.
Claiming that I could barely see my reflection—true enough, too, since Ricardo had nearly buried the mirror with his own
cartes
, yellowed articles from the trade papers about his act, and old broadsides where he’d circled his name with red ink—I took my costume and flung it on a hook in the corner. I could do perfectly well without a makeup table. I did only tableau now, after all, and as long as my ribs showed, it barely mattered how the rest of me looked.

Both Alley and I turned when Matina walked in. She wore a new dress of pink crepe de chine, and she did not so much as look at me when she passed. Our last conversation still hung between us, but I would find a way to repair the damage.

“What do you have there, Zippy?” Matina flapped her hand at him as she plopped down in front of her makeup station, squinting at her image in the mirror.

The boy was busy tacking a curling broadside to the Notice Board that read
The Negro is a FREEDMAN.

“Free!” Zippy said to Matina, chin over shoulder. “See here?” He poked at the poster. “Free.” The black letters
F-R-E-E-D-M-A-N
jumped out against the background of coffee-colored paper.

“
None
of us here is free,” Alley scoffed, as he struggled to secure his crown to his ragged hair, his eyes on Matina.

Like a schoolmarm, Matina shushed him. “Quiet now. No need to rile the child.”

Alley blushed bright red. He steadied himself by putting a great hand on Matina’s dressing table as she rolled a pair of stockings into a small bundle. His fingers, like mallets, drummed out some tune of frustration on top of the battered wood. “Gotta talk to you.” Had the poor bugger become so trapped by Bridgett and the Copperheads that he needed Matina’s counsel? Hadn’t I’d already told him involvement was a mistake?

Matina wrinkled her brow and struggled to her feet. She nodded for Alley to follow, and together they made their way out to the hallway. Bridgett, alone at her mirror, watched the two of them, a look of hatred in her eyes.

Heads pressed together, Matina and Alley whispered who-knew-what. I could see them talking but couldn’t hear a word they were saying. Alley stood entirely too close, swiping his stringy hair from his eyes while Matina talked, and at one point he cranked himself down to her like an old oak tree trying to bend in a gale. Matina grabbed his forearm with her fingers. She shook her head no, and neither of them moved. They just stared at each other, faces an inch apart. For a heart-stopping moment, I could have sworn she leaned forward and kissed him right on his rough lips. I shifted my gaze, and no more than thirty seconds later, Alley straightened up and stumbled off down the hall looking stricken.

I kept seeing the lunkhead bending down and Matina leaning toward him, over and over again, but I was certain she hadn’t kissed him. No. Matina was only being kind. By my reckoning, Alley had run into some kind of trouble, and Matina was counseling him. Simple as
that. Even if it wasn’t so simple, what did it matter? I would be with Iell within the hour.

I waited for Alley at the end of his early show, hoping to inquire about his talk with Matina. I would ask him discreetly if everything was all right. Would he prefer a man’s counsel to Matina’s? But he only grunted as he walked by. I didn’t dally any longer for fear of running into Barnum or his wife.

N
OTHING TO
fear, I told myself, as I watched Iell’s boardinghouse from behind a tree across the street. The building glowed with respectability, and climbing ivy softened the crisp exterior. Slipping out of the Museum had been quite easy—everyone I knew had been onstage or in tableau, and Cook and Fish both had midmorning duties—but it still took all my nerve to step out from my hiding place and into the sun. Patting the tree for good luck, I crossed the street fast and hustled up the boardinghouse walk. This time I had not worn my padded suit.
Disguise be damned
, I’d told myself,
I am who I am!
When I knocked at the front door the matron nodded me in without a word. For a moment, I was relieved, but then I got to thinking. What if the matron was reporting my comings and goings to one of the Barnums? Mr. Barnum was already paying for Iell’s lodgings. Why wouldn’t he also slip the mistress of the house a few pennies to keep an eye on her? Who else had witnessed my visits? Stop it, I told myself. Iell is waiting upstairs. Buck up. Be a man. With fake bravado, I straightened my jacket and climbed the stairs.

The moment her apartment door opened, Iell pulled me in and kissed me lightly on both cheeks. All my fears evaporated, and it was all I could do to feel my feet on the floor. We had difficult things to discuss, but I grinned like an idiot, wanting only to tell her how lovely she looked. As usual in her presence, the words stuck in my throat.

“Before we sit,” she said lightly, “I’ve something I’m dying to show you.”

Taking my hand, she walked me through the parlor. The bluebells, still on the little table, hung limply over the edge of their vase now, and a touch of opium hung in the air, but in the high light of day it looked like another room entirely. Clean. Illuminated. Iell led me on through a half-opened door into a second chamber with an embossed fainting couch and two opposing wing chairs flanking an unlit fireplace. On the far side hung a huge portrait of Barnum as a much younger man. Other than that, the room held nothing personal. No pictures of friends or family, no books or clothing, nothing intimate that I could see.

“Just look at my newest toy.” Iell made a sweeping gesture toward a pianoforte, delicately carved with miniature heads of wolves, hawks, and lions. Leaving me, she walked to it and placed a long white finger on one of its keys.

Plink.
The sound danced through the room.

I moved to join her, overwhelmed to be in her presence. “I didn’t know you played.” For the first time, I noticed a small freckle on her neck, the loveliest little flaw.

“Oh, I don’t. It is a recent gift. It’s lovely, don’t you think?”

Smiling, she slipped an arm through mine, sending a shiver through me. I had to fight not to reach over and tuck in a strand of red hair that arched down around her ear. But then that loose strand reminded me of one of Brady’s photographs: Iell straddling a daybed, her hair free and wild, a single lock falling over one eye. How comfortable she’d looked. As if she’d been caught unawares in her natural state. Although she hadn’t been in a natural state. She had posed, hadn’t she? What was I thinking? She wasn’t comfortable. She was an actress. A performer. That look had been faked. Of course it had. Pushing my doubts away, I followed her to the high-backed chairs, and we sat.

Although I considered broaching the subject of Mrs. Barnum, it felt too soon. “I played a bit of piano in my youth,” I said instead.

“You played?” Iell asked. “How wonderful. I suspect it was that mother of yours who taught you.”

“My mother taught me many things.”

Iell dropped her gaze slightly, giving me a chance to examine her aristocratic nose and the swoop of a cheekbone. She seemed almost like a different person in the daytime. Much more relaxed. More forthcoming. And with her beard rolled up as it was, I couldn’t help but observe the roundness of her breasts beneath the silk of her dark green dress. Her charms pulled at me even without the root in my belly.

“What do you think your mother would say if she saw how you are looking at me right now?” Iell said. “Surely she didn’t teach you that?”

I was mortified. “Please forgive me! You must find me unspeakably rude.” I rose, fighting to regain control. “I am not normally so forward, I assure you. I would never presume to gaze at you as I’ve seen Barnum do.”

Iell laughed. “Now
that
is certainly true enough. Sit down. Don’t worry yourself so.”

Her slender hands on her lap, she gave me a moment and then said, “I see you have come to me this morning au naturel, Bartholomew. No padding? No disguise? I’ve been thinking quite a bit about you lately, and I must say I envy you. I really do.”

She’d been thinking of me? How marvelous. “I can’t imagine why you’d envy me.”

Iell stretched her legs out straight in front of her, as a man might. “Adaptability is quite a gift.”

“My gift is being observable, Iell, not adaptable,” I reminded her. It occurred to me that I’d never before used her Christian name in her presence.