The Circus in Winter Read Online Free PDF Page A

appearance would soften or harden to accommodate the shape of the man she'd taken. These men walked around the winter quarters in a drunken stupor, hardly eating, stumbling through their duties until she tired of them and banished them from her bed. The circus people grilled these lovers for her secrets.
Does she stew up potions? Does she sleep human sleep? What does she eat?
But these men never spoke of her, neither fondly nor harshly, and for months afterward, they moped about, shaking their heads, cleansing themselves of her charm.
    Jennie Dixianna knew about Wallace Porter's dead wife. A year earlier, he'd held a boisterous Christmas party in the mansion, the first time his friends, business associates, and circus employees all commingled. Jennie wandered into the study and saw Irene's portrait over the mantel—a small woman white to near translucence with black moon eyes, steady and sad.
    "The rosy cheeks are a bit of painterly license, I'm afraid. She was dying, even then." A woman stepped into the room, her fairness shimmering in the firelight, a young girl standing in the folds of her burgundy velvet dress. "I'm Elizabeth Cooper," she said, her chin jutting. "My daughter, Grace. My husband and I are friends of Mr. Porter."
    Jennie introduced herself and offered her hand, but Elizabeth ignored it, fussing with the lace bow in her daughter's blue-black hair. Jennie turned her gaze back to Irene's quiet and determined face. "She died some time ago I understand," she said.
    "Yes. It was quite a blow to our dear Wallace. I don't know that he's ever gotten over it."
    Jennie smiled. "Perhaps it's time for Mr. Porter to stop mourning her," she said, and left the room.
    Since then, Jennie had spent many nights darting from shadow to shadow, following Porter on his solitary sojourns around the winter quarters. "Checking on the stock," he always claimed, but his dark-rimmed eyes told a different story. She saw the pain in them, in his stoop, his gait. While others felt sympathy for him, Jennie felt only disdain. She wore her wound like a talisman bracelet, a secret treasure. Surely, Jennie thought, much could be gained from a man so weak of heart.
    But the night of the card game, Jennie discovered that Wallace Porter could not be won the usual way. He'd seen through her simpering and believed he'd found her truest self, but Jennie was layered like an onion, skin over skin over naught. With a flick of her festering wrist, she could be any woman at all: mother or shrew, whore or lady, sister or siren. She knew what sort of woman Wallace Porter desired. He wanted a ghost. It was no trouble, really. She'd played spirit made flesh before.
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    A FEW DAYS AFTER the card game, Jennie watched Wallace Porter sneaking into the practice barn a few minutes before her usual arrival time. He'd been doing some checking, the circus people told Jennie. Playing cards with the roust-abouts, asking about her without seeming to ask about her. No doubt, he'd learned that she didn't practice the Spin of Death during winter, preferring to use those months to rest her weary arm and let her wrist heal. Instead, each afternoon she performed a regimen of stretches and acrobatic flips to stay supple.
    When she opened the practice-barn door, she felt Porter's presence immediately—in the corner amid a tangle of unicycles and bicycles, crouching behind a wall of juggling pins stacked into a pyramid. After stoking the iron stove, she hung her overcoat on a nail and changed her mud-clogged boots for a dainty pair of dancing slippers stuffed in her coat pocket. She stretched close to the stove, her smoky breath drifting around her shiny face. Slowly, layers of clothes fell away—sweaters over shirts, pants over pants—until Jennie Dixianna appeared wearing nothing but a pink leotard snug as flesh. She hurled herself headlong down the length of the practice mat in a flurry of flips and twists. When she practiced or performed, Jennie felt herself