Page 37 of The Peculiar Incident at Thistlewick House

That evening, with the big tent now up and everyone exhausted, the troupe sat together around a small fire, where a piglet was roasting on a hastily made spit.

The animal had been acquired somewhat dubiously during the afternoon but Katerina, who laid down the moral law the troupe abided by, had been told Harry had purchased it from a local farmer.

Mallory welcomed the fire; she felt chilled to the bone and would happily sit in front of it for the several hours it would take the pig to cook.

The delicious, slightly sweet smell of the sizzling pork fat, however, was torture when you knew you wouldn’t get to bite into the crispy crackling or taste much of the moist meat.

She was pleased to currently be in relatively good health, as there were often times when the pain in her abdomen was unbearable.

Samson always recommended strong liquor, whereas his wife insisted working through the discomfort would yield the best results – but then Katerina was conscious they had bills to pay and thirteen people to support through the bleak winter ahead.

The Ballards had paid for her to see a doctor when the bleeding had been particularly bad, but the man was clearly baffled by Mallory’s symptoms. He pronounced she was suffering from ‘multiple anomalies’ and that her growths were tumours, but could be no more specific than that, and had absolutely no idea how to treat them.

And then, with no thought to Mallory’s feelings, he’d gone on to express an interest in leading her autopsy to Katerina, without even considering she was in the room to hear the unpalatable discussion of what might happen to her body after her death.

He gave them poultices for what he believed were haemorrhoids, and laxatives for her constipation, but she suspected what the doctor did not – all her ailments were linked to the lumps.

He recommended a bland diet of soft foods and an expensive course of bloodletting, which had resulted in no discernible improvement, especially as Mallory feared she didn’t have a lot of blood to spare.

Not wanting to make a fuss, she declined Samson’s offer to consult another physician and undergo further unpleasant examinations.

Hazibub, their snake charmer, had a soft spot for Mallory, and occasionally and discreetly passed over preparations of opium when she was at her worst. During a particularly bad spell, late that summer, he’d taken her to one side and given her a small blue corked bottle from his locked miniature cabinet of medicines – a beautifully inlaid decorative wooden box that resembled a tiny wardrobe.

If it ever got too much, he told her, the liquid within would give her a final escape from all the pain of this earth in the most pleasant way.

It would be their secret and her decision.

She pocketed it and thanked him by adding tiny, embroidered snakes to the edges of his cotton handkerchiefs – which he found highly amusing.

‘Tomorrow we need to start repainting the waggons before the wet weather comes. Hazibub tells me we have a week before the storms arrive.’ Samson addressed his troupe as he passed a bottle of spirits around.

‘I was not meaning a storm of weather but a storm of anger,’ Hazibub piped up. ‘I am telling you, many times, we must be leaving this place. It will not end well.’

Mallory cast nervous eyes at Zella. If their mystical foreign friend was predicting bad things, then bad things were sure to happen. But Katerina was having none of it and she inhaled deeply on her thin Russian cigar before commenting.

‘Nyet. Ve leave when I say. Troubles is part of our living, but it comes from a place of jealousy. They do not like that you and I are free, that ve do not rise in the morning to the same view for years and years. I am not tied to Samson vith some legal document. I do not follow the ridiculous rules of a church that has enough money for silver plate but not to feed its poor and dying. I am not ashamed of my body and choose who I share it vith. These people are trapped by their stupid rules and hate to see those who are not.’

‘But if Hazibub believes there’s danger ahead—’ Little Cupid was half a bottle of cheap gin down and wriggling uncomfortably on the wooden bench, his legs sticking out in front of him. The mystical snake charmer had something of the soothsayer about him and had been proven right before.

‘I told you all,’ Katerina interrupted, ‘I see good fortune in my crystal sphere. Ve leave here vith enough money to see us through the vinter and buy new acts for the coming year.’

The last time the troupe had encountered good fortune, Katerina had employed blackmail – Mallory was scant on detail but Harry said it involved threats to reveal a compromising situation that a wealthy gentleman had found himself in with one of the Caley sisters.

Everyone knew Katerina’s crystal ball could no more predict the future than Po Po’s bones.

She was skilled in her craft though, able to make astute observations about the person sitting across the table from her, and offer dramatic but vague pronouncements.

Overeager customers supplied the information she needed, delighted to think good things were on the horizon, and adapted her words to suit their circumstances.

Her reputation spread because ‘You vill be blessed before Michaelmas’ could mean the arrival of a baby, a new job or recovery from an ailment.

But if she was predicting good things, and Hazibub bad, then Mallory knew whom she was inclined to believe.

The Ballards had met in Liverpool, but Mallory only knew this because Samson occasionally talked about it when he’d been drinking.

Apparently, Katerina had run off with a free-thinking Russian artist in her youth and lived with him for a couple of years, but it had ended badly.

This was where Mallory suspected she’d picked up the odd Russian word and possibly why she pretended to be from a country she clearly didn’t hail from – her dark colouring suiting her tale.

But many of the troupe had secrets. You only ran away to join the circus if you had something to run from, and there was an unspoken agreement not to pry into the past of another.

Katerina was the level head behind the troupe.

She harnessed Samson’s wild ideas, knowing which of his grand plans were viable and which were pure folly.

For a mighty man, Mallory observed that he often behaved like a child: overexcitable one minute, and with a raging temper the next.

But he loved the woman he called his wife, and he loved his circus, in equal measure.

‘We’re going to teach Beauty to remove my hat, scarf and mittens,’ the oldest Caley girl announced, changing the subject and feeding scraps to the small capuchin monkey sitting on her shoulder.

The sisters, close enough in age to be passed off as twins in their act, had grown up around horses and had an affinity with them, speaking their language almost as well as their own.

‘In this weather, you’d be better off teaching him to put them on,’ Little Cupid joked. ‘In fact, try training the stupid beast to steal some for us.’

‘This is not a place I vant headaches with the locals,’ Katerina said. ‘Just two weeks I ask you to stay out of troubles and then ve can be on our vay. Scraps outside the taverns are harmless but you must not get involved with the peoples,’ she warned.

Mallory knew that even Katerina would find ways around the law when the needs of the troupe depended on it, but she didn’t countenance outright theft. Harry, however, had no such scruples. All eyes met across the piglet but no one spoke.

‘There was a smart gentleman on a horse at the camp this morning,’ Mallory said. ‘He asked me how long we were staying but talked much longer to Zella.’

Katerina choked on her cigar and turned to her daughter. ‘I have told you about this, Zella,’ she snapped. ‘The men are only after one thing. Do not let them have it.’

The young tightrope artist glared at Mallory, who immediately dipped her eyes. She hadn’t intended to cause trouble for her friend.

There was a sudden thundering of feet and Samson jumped up from the bench, grabbing one end of the strong greenwood hazel branch they were using for the spit.

Hazibub immediately grabbed the other, and they whisked the pig out of sight.

Within seconds, the three hands, led by Harry, came running to the fire, chased by a couple of locals.

They’d clearly been fighting, as the start of a shiner was visible on Harry’s left cheek, and one of the village lads had bleeding knuckles and a fired-up look about him.

‘Where’s the piglet, you thieving bastards?’ The accuser was perhaps twenty, with a square head and wide nose.

‘What pig?’ Zella said, her wide eyes full of innocence.

‘I won’t have no one taking stuff from Lord Felthorpe,’ the man shouted, shoving Harry to the side and approaching the fire.

‘I can damn well smell it. Late litter. Nine there this morning and only eight in the pen now. We know it was you. There’s always upsets when your sort pass through.

Like the fucking gypsies. Nothing but thieves, cheats and whores. ’

Mallory felt uncomfortable because she knew the piglet had been stolen and, although she didn’t like the words used or the tone, all of those descriptions could apply to her friends. She tried to skirt behind the bench and make her way to the big tent.

‘What the fuck is that?’ A gap-toothed adolescent pointed directly at her.

‘Not the missing pig but she’s certainly pig-ugly.

’ The older lad roared at his rather pathetic joke.

Mallory felt the twist of humiliation, even though she’d endured a lifetime of name-calling.

But he was in his element and looking closely at the faces of the circus troupe in the flickering firelight for someone else to ridicule.

‘And here, some foreign woman with her head balanced on a pile of gold rings. Look, a flea-infested monkey. And bugger me if it ain’t General Tom Thumb,’ he said. ‘Jesus, I ain’t never seen so many freaks.’

It was the wrong thing to say to Little Cupid.

Jealousy was a difficult shadow to step from because he’d constantly bemoaned the unparalleled success of Charles Stratton, a person of similar stature, who was known to the world as General Tom Thumb.

He was Phineas Barnum’s star act and had even toured Europe, earning more money than Cupid could dream of, performing for the likes of Napoleon III and German nobility.

It had played no small part in Cupid’s downward spiral from enjoying a drink with the rest of them, to pitiful alcoholic over the intervening years, and it broke Mallory’s heart to see.

Cupid threw his empty gin bottle to the floor, where it smashed upon impact, and wriggled from the bench.

The young lad smiled, amused by the thought of the tiny man taking him on in some foolhardy show of might, when Samson strode out of the big tent with a loaded shotgun in his hands.

That was the thing about this troupe; if you picked on one, then you’d better be prepared to take on them all.

Yes, they bickered amongst themselves, but when an outsider attacked, they banded together like family.

‘I don’t want trouble but I’m telling you we don’t have your pig and you can bloody show my people a bit more respect.’

He walked over to the most vocal of the men and squared up to him, as the younger lad spoke up.

‘Leave it, Silas,’ he said. ‘He’ll shoot you as soon as look at you.

One little pig isn’t worth getting yourself killed over.

’ He tugged at his friend’s arm and Mallory could see the other one grinding his teeth, as he contemplated the reality of the situation.

Even without the gun, Samson was an intimidating presence.

Six feet three of brawn and solid muscle, and a face that she’d once heard someone say needed to be beaten handsome again.

As the local lads slunk back to the village, Katerina stood up and walked over to the hired hands, all five feet of her looking up to the three burly lads who’d thundered back to the camp from the village.

‘You stole from Lord Felthorpe.’ It wasn’t a question. ‘There will be no pork for you.’ And she reached up and slapped each one of them hard across the cheek, proving, yet again, who really ran this circus.