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It was Lettie who found him first, in the mess tent that night.
He was staring at his own warped reflection in the metal of the giant pot, the one Cook Nellie had used that afternoon at lunch, slopping out goulash for all the oddities. The tent was quiet by then, though, animals having long been put to bed, and performers too.
He couldn’t quite make her out in the polished copper, initially, just knew his solitude was being intruded upon by a formless figure hovering over his hunched shoulder.
“Up late?” she asked, soft words sliding along in the damp, stagnant air of the late summer’s dark.
“Out late, Lettie,” he corrected.
“Thought you were done with that,” she replied, barest hint of flint in her voice.
He couldn’t help his sharp snort. “Apparently not.”
He didn’t hear her sigh, but he thought he saw it, in the tilt of her mirrored head, the tautness of her shoulders. She said nothing as she walked closer, night skirt shuffling around her legs, and he wondered if she might lean in when she passed, sniff his breath for the sting of whisky.
He caught her rocking back on her heels from the corner of his eye, however, when she was near enough to see him fully in the pale light cast by the nearest lantern.
“The hell happened to you?” A resigned sigh.
Phillip shrugged, looked closer at his twisted shape. The hazy reflection didn’t tell him if the swelling along his eye, the throbbing of his cheekbone, would be visible to anyone else. His gaze slid sideways, to Lettie’s murky expression, and he had his answer.
His eyes met hers, chilly blue against warm brown, and she swallowed back the commentary he could see writ across her face. “Oughtta’ put something cold on that, Carlyle,” she told him instead.
He shrugged again, watched her pad to the stove, bank the cooling coals back to warmth, set a kettle down. She pulled a small sachet down from one of the cabinets, and he recognized its shape. It was the one that WD took a pinch from whenever he had a sore throat, that Deng dashed into a mug of hot water when frosty winds made her eyes tear up and her nose turn red.
He tugged at the loose collar of his shirt and slipped another button open, sweating in the heat shimmering off the cast iron. “Constantine still feeling unwell?” His voice was harsh, too low, enough to make his companion startle.
She spared him a glance, licked her lips before turning back to the kettle. “Yes.” Voice low as well, and too quiet for her solid frame.
He should have said something then, asked after the man’s health, offered a reassuring word or touch. A different night, and he would have.
Perhaps she should have said something then too, planted herself before him, demanded an explanation. Instead she twisted her hands together, fingers fluttering for want of a task, still unaccustomed to being idle. He caught her, sometimes, on her days off, straightening up the dressing rooms she wasn’t using, intently hanging Charles’s vests and folding Anne’s silks.
Her hands froze at the shrill whistle piercing the still air in the tent, then she snatched the nearest towel and plucked up the heavy kettle. He might have offered his assistance then, but something in her eyes told him she wanted none of that from him, not when he’d come in looking like he’d been in a tussle at the nearest tavern while she had spent the day patiently tending to her ill colleague.
She said nothing, nodded tightly at him as she passed. He waited until the tent flap settled behind her exit, until the faintest breeze from the outside world had faded.
“Good night, Lettie,” he murmured, to the emptiness.
He stared again, at himself, at the cookware, at nothing at all, in the shadow of the flickering lamp. He might have stayed there for a while, forever, until the dock workers roused, until the first light of dawn eased the darkness around him.
But it wasn't more than a few minutes before he felt the air shift, heard the rustle of the heavy tent canvas being pushed back. He was moments away from demanding, asking, begging Lettie to simply let him be, when the words stilled on the tip of his tongue.
Because he recognized that sound — the even pace of long limbs, the confident stride, the firm fall of leather shoes on the packed dirt of the mess floor — before he could say a thing. And then it wasn’t Lettie’s shape lurking over him, not her stern, soft face he saw, instead something that looked, from his angle, tall as the tent rafters.
“Phillip,” the specter behind him said, light as breath.
“PT,” he responded, heavy and dull.
“Lettie told me I might find you here,” the showman said, and Phillip almost winced at the volume of his voice, the shattered stillness.
“Shouldn’t you be home?” he deflected.
The older man took another step forward. “Said I might want to get a good look at you, too.”
“Lettie worries too much,” Phillip said.
“She’s worried about Constantine,” Barnum corrected. “You, she’s rather upset with.”
“I can’t imagine why,” Phillip grumbled.
Barnum edged closer, leaned toward Phillip’s face. “I can.”
“Go home, PT,” Phillip coaxed. “Your family is waiting for you.”
“My family, if they have any sense,” Barnum countered, “are long since abed. As should you be, too.”
“And you should have realized long ago that sense is not a thing I possess in abundance.” Phillip stared forward resolutely.
“Oh, yes,” Barnum replied, airily. “I am well aware. Which explains why you are here, at this hour, staring at an empty pot, getting blood all over the floor of my mess tent.”
It’s not your tent, Phillip thought to counter, before the prior part of the showman’s statement settled on him. “Blood?” he asked lowly, reaching a hand to his cheek. Blood, he thought to himself, looking at the stain on his fingertips. He glanced down at the dirt below him, just dirt, nothing here, more Barnum blarney, and was too busy sifting the soil with a shoe tip to see the other man approach with a damp rag until the cloth was inches from his nose.
Something uncurled in him, a lightning reflex honed by hundreds of tight, balanced moves in the ring, sidestepping a galloping horse, snatching a flying cane out of midair, ducking under a gout of flame. His hand snapped up before he could blink, fingers clamped around Barnum’s wrist.
He felt the older man startle, heard the sharp inhale. “Just a rag, Phillip,” Barnum said after a few breaths. Phillip’s grip didn’t ease.
“I’m fine,” he declared, pretending not to hear his partner’s disbelieving snort.
“What happened?” Barnum finally asked, not protesting the point.
What did happen? And there was a moment, when his lip started to tremble, the story poised on the edge of his tongue, ready to run out into the muggy air.
But then his jaw clenched, trapped the truth like a snare. “Nothing.”
The other man’s forearm flexed. “I’d rather you didn’t say anything than lie to me, Phillip.”
“That’s rich,” he raised his gaze to the showman’s face, at last, and the expression there gentled the rest of his words, “coming from the king of humbug himself.”
“I try not to lie about the important things,” Barnum said, subdued. And there’s a truth, for once. He gave a shake of his head, pulled himself out of some reverie. “Don’t tell me, then. But at least clean yourself up a little bit.”
Phillip relented, plucked the outstretched cloth from Barnum’s long fingers with his left hand and pressed it over his cheek bone. He only let out the slightest hiss when the rough rag hit his torn flesh, considered it a victory.
Barnum looked down at him, corners of his lips pulled back tightly. Too much to hope he would just let it be.
“Phillip,” he began gentle, ended stern, “who hit you?”
“Who do you think?” Phillip snapped, surprising himself. Haven’t you picked up enough clues, elicited enough information, pulled out enough details to start painting that picture, however much I wanted to keep it obscured from you?
Barnum just sighed at the outburst though, dropping his chin to his chest. “Of course.” He worked his mouth for a moment, pressed hands to hips. Don’t start with me, PT. Phillip debated the odds he would be able to push past his partner, make it away from the circus without the other man dashing after him. Not a chance, the rational part of his brain said.
“I simply don’t understand why you keep giving the man opportunities to –”
“I started it,” he rasped, throat thick, to hold back the shut up, PT, he wanted to let loose. That roused the showman, and his spine stiffened, his head snapped up.
Barnum scoffed. “Oh? What did you do, Phillip, wear the wrong cravat to dinner? Use the improper fork for the spruce grouse?”
“I started it,” he repeated, voice rougher.
“Or perhaps you addressed one of the servants as though he were a fellow human? God forbid!”
“I started it,” Phillip muttered once more.
“Hmm, I hope you accidentally dragged in muck from one of the horse stalls –”
“Damnit, PT,” he said, hollowed out. “I started it.” He looked down at his free hand, uncertain when he had clenched it into a fist.
“I doubt it.”
Why is it that you, the master of artifice, always place so much faith in others? “I did,” Phillip insisted.
“Phillip,” Barnum began, in the same placating tone Phillip had heard directed against insistent bankers, drunk patrons, morally outraged mothers, “whatever it is you said, that doesn’t justify –”
“I hit him,” Phillip snapped. He had to ease his grip on the rag against his face, hadn’t realized how hard he was pressing into his cheek.
“I…you…what?” Barnum asked.
“I hit him, PT. Right across the mouth. Busted his lip.” He couldn’t help the flutter of satisfaction that rooted around his chest at the look on Barnum’s face. Finally shut him up, Phillip thought, vindictively, not sure which him it was he meant.
“Look, Phillip,” Barnum finally found his words, “I’m sure it was…in the moment, with him coming after you, it’s understandable, to respond like that –”
“I hit him first.” There, finally, out of his throat. Too late to take back now.
Barnum’s gaze dropped to Phillip’s right hand, and for a moment Phillip wondered if the other man could see, even in the dim lamplight, the red marks across his knuckles, the abraded skin.
“I…oh.” Barnum swallowed. “Well, I’m certain he had it coming.”
“That’s not the point, PT.” Phillip brought up his hand to study his fist. “He didn’t do anything to me.” Ungrateful wretch. “He didn’t come after me.” Degenerate whelp. “It was just words.” Cavorting around with those foul creatures. “I could have left.” That filthy whore. “Walked out the door.” And that man, that perverted rotter. “But I hit him, instead.”
“Phillip…” Barnum offered, ineptly.
“Whatever it is he said, that doesn’t justify it.” One corner of Phillip’s mouth twisted up. “Isn’t that right, PT?”
Barnum glared at him, speechless, for once. No clever correction, PT? No glib retort?
“I suppose, after all,” Phillip stretched his fingers wide, balled them back up again, “I am, in fact, my father’s son.”
“No.” And then it was Barnum’s turn to clench his fists, down by his sides. “You are much, much more than that.”
“The evidence,” Phillip sighed, weary beyond measure, “would suggest otherwise.”
Barnum shifted between his feet, leveled a glance at Phillip. “Would you have hit me, had I said to you the same things he did?”
Phillip stared, flabbergasted. “Of…of course not,” he stuttered, after a moment. “But you aren’t –” He stopped there, coughed so he didn’t have to continue. He couldn’t bring himself to look up to see the expression on Barnum’s face. “And anyways,” he fumbled, desperate, “if you had hit me back, I don’t think I’d have been getting up off the floor.”
Barnum looked down at his own hands then, skin stretched across his knuckles. “I wouldn’t, Phillip.”
“I know.” Phillip studied the other man’s hands too, the graceful fingers, the broad palms, the brawny forearms. He marveled at the amount of damage his partner could do, if he so chose. “You wouldn’t.” A hushed whisper. “You’re a good man.”
Barnum dashed a wrist across his damp forehead, then held Phillip’s gaze until the younger man had to drop his eyes. “Do you think I’ve never struck a man before, Phillip?”
Phillip’s mind stalled, again. “I…you?” And then he thought about it, really, had the image of his friend, a reedy boy with doe eyes and floppy hair, on his own, on the frontier, surrounded by avarice and cruelty and a hundred things worse. His grip on the cloth against his face tightened, ground the fabric into his bruised flesh. The spike of pain gave him an instant’s clarity. What else could you have done, with no shield but the one you could create yourself? “I’m sure, when you were younger…you did what you had to do, PT.”
“As did you,” Barnum replied, firmly.
“No,” Phillip muttered, cold. “I could have walked out that door first, instead. I didn’t have to do…” another clench of his fist, nails hard against pale skin, “what I did.” Like father…
“How many times?” Barnum asked, low and slow.
“What?” Phillip said. “Just once. I…I stopped there.”
“No,” Barnum corrected, something in his voice Phillip couldn’t quite place. “I mean how many times did he hit you?”
“Just once, too.” Phillip lifted the cloth away from his face, as if to prove the truth of his words. Like son.
Barnum huffed, then steeled himself. “I wasn’t talking about today, Phillip.”
Oh. And there it was, finally out in the open, after all their talking around the subject, after all PT’s half-voiced questions, after all Phillip’s oblique references.
Where to start, then? He couldn’t quite recall how old he had been when his father had learned he was spending his afternoons running across the grounds with the gardener’s son, rather than finishing the assignments given out by his Latin tutor. Don’t despoil the family name, and a hard slap about his ears.
“I don’t know,” he said.
Or the first time he’d discovered how sneaking drags from a hip flask could make a benefit dinner slide by a little quicker, could quiet a few of the darker thoughts spiraling down in his mind, could soften the sting of a backhanded compliment, a subtle slur. The front door had just closed behind their departing guests, after, when his father gripped him by the throat, never humiliate me like that again, slammed the back of his head into the nearest wall.
“More than once,” he added.
Maybe that last time, when he’d gone to tell his parents the truth of where he had been spending his days since meeting PT, confirmed the rumors they had heard floating around the most recent society soiree were in fact true, that this was what he wanted to do with his life, nothing else. His father had told him, once, to stop, come to his senses. He refused, and the next message had been a fist across his mouth, a twin blow to the one he would throw all those months later. Social suicide, his father muttered, shaking out his hand, and Phillip said nothing before walking out the door.
“Enough,” he decided. Too many.
“A lot,” Barnum summarized for him. Phillip didn’t nod, didn’t flinch, didn’t dare drop his eyes from Barnum’s own. “Then let me ask you this, Phillip. How is what you did today not justified?” What is one strike, against a lifetime of blows?
“How does that make me any different from him, PT?” Too many.
Barnum sighed. “Do you think he ever felt as torn up about what he did as you do right now?”
I don’t know. Maybe. Once, long ago. “What does that matter?”
“You’re not him, Phillip. You’re not anything like him.”
I prefer to work in the evenings. I never cared for Bronte. I can’t stand deviled eggs. “We’re not so different as you seem to think, PT.” And, apparently, we both think a closed fist is the ideal way to resolve a family squabble.
“You are, in the ways that matter.”
Phillip’s hand dropped from his cheek; the rag flopped wetly to the dirt. “You have too much faith, PT.” That every new dream can be realized, that everyone will come to see the world as you do, that this show will make it, again. That I can still be a good man.
“You don’t have enough, Phillip.” He should have seen that one coming from a mile away. All he could do was shake his head, though.
Barnum stepped over the discarded rag, edged into Phillip’s space, and Phillip noticed the top buttons of the other man’s shirt left open against the heat, drops of sweat prickling at his collarbone.
“You’re wrong,” Phillip whispered, blinking furiously.
“I’m not,” Barnum countered, steel in his voice, his eyes.
“How can a man be anything other than the product of whence he came?” Phillip asked, bitterly.
Barnum chuckled at that, warm breath puffing between them. “You tell me, Phillip. When was the last time you saw me groveling to some swell whose shirt I had to let out because he’s been hitting the custards a little too hard? Do you think I would simper at an ill-tempered man and agree with everything he said for nothing but a handful of silver? Am I the type to bow my head, say nothing, stand blithely by when someone strikes my…” a flash, across his face, “…my friend?”
“Oh.” Oh. “I…”
“You aren’t him, Phillip.” A hand swiping through the muggy air, for emphasis. “One single moment does not define your character.”
“I...” Phillip swallowed, thickly. “When did you become so damn insightful, anyway?”
A corner of Barnum’s mouth turned up. “Well,” he said, on safer ground, “what took you so long to realize I do, in fact, know what I’m talking about?”
Phillip let out a laugh, strangled into something else halfway through. “Do you?” His breath caught. “That’s…” he started, the rest of his sentence muffled when Barnum snaked an arm behind his neck, pulled him forward.
“We’re our own men, Phillip,” he whispered, fierce, into the younger man’s ear. “We get to decide who we’ll be.”
Phillip nodded, unblemished cheek dragging against the linen of Barnum’s shirt. “We get to decide.” A brief squeeze, gentle, around his shoulders. Say it enough, and you may even start to believe it.
He felt Barnum’s sigh echo through the other man’s chest. “And sometimes, Phillip, I wish you would decide to adopt just the slightest bit more self-preservation.”
He considered then his father’s dogmatic obeisance to the high society mood, his miserly grip on every nickel of the Carlyle fortune, his utter disdain for any sordid new rebellion. “PT, I think, in that regard…” He thought about wood blistering in flames, choking smoke, smoldering sparks arcing into his clothes, his skin, his eyes. He tried to imagine his father risking an inferno for the sake of anything. Anyone. “I am quite…unique.”
“Well,” Barnum huffed into Phillip's hair, “thank heaven, then, for small mercies.”
It was Lettie who found him, again, in the early dawn, this time hunched over a mess table across from his partner.
“…and so there I was, when he stepped down from the caboose. Didn’t even give him the chance to get both feet on the ground before I clocked him, hard as I could, across his jaw.” Neither man noticed her arrival, too engrossed.
“You did not!” Phillip’s eyebrows flew up. “PT, he must have been twice your size!”
“Oh, three times, at least.” Barnum leaned back, hands sketching out the tale. “They didn’t call him ‘the bear’ for nothing. But you know what they say, the bigger they are…”
“The harder they fall?” Phillip offered.
“No, the harder they hit back! Got me right in the nose. Knocked me flat on my backside.” Barnum grinned at the younger man, oblivious to the disapproving shake of Lettie’s head.
“Christ, PT! Then what?”
“He came up to me, real slow. Loomed over my prone figure, tall as a sycamore. Let out a curse, dark as sin.”
Phillip leaned in, mouth ajar. Lettie found herself leaning in, too. “And then?”
“Then he threw his head back. Laughed so hard he nearly fell over.”
“Wait, what?”
“Oh, yes, said he admired my gall, little shrimp that I was. Told me his maiden aunt could have hit him harder. Plucked me up off the ground, set me on my feet. Said if I was ever going to make it out west, I needed to learn how a real man threw a punch.”
“Jesus, PT. You’re lucky he didn’t break your neck!”
“Nearly broke my nose! But after that, he’d come find me when we had a free moment, stuff a flour sack full of dirt and straw and let me take a whack. Taught me to where to put my feet, how to pivot from the hips.” Barnum demonstrated, fists up around his face, twisting in his seat as he sent out a slow right hook. “The follow-through, he told me, that’s the most important part. Don’t punch something, punch through it. Good advice, too, really came in handy at that saloon in Cheyenne…”
He might have gone on then, had he not finally caught a glimpse of Lettie, silhouetted in the open tent flap. There was a part of her that wished he hadn’t, would have loved to hear the rest of the story, no matter how much she would have scoffed and ridiculed the man during the entire tale.
Phillip followed the other man’s gaze, giving Lettie a solid look at the dark crescent hovering beside the young man’s eye, sliding down his cheek. And she would have gone over to him, too, tutted and fussed and fretted, had she not just spent hours doing the same at another man too dumb to ask for help until his troubles had laid him flat.
“You two loons been up all night, then?” she sighed as she approached the cold stove, replacing the kettle.
“How is Constantine?” Phillip asked, voice hoarse, and she thought she might devolve into more mother-henning, after all.
“He’s fine,” she said, instead. “Better. Fever broke a few hours ago.”
Barnum and Phillip both unwound a bit at that. “I’m glad to hear it, Lettie,” Barnum told her. “Do you need anything?”
“Need anything?” she scoffed. “About a week’s worth of sleep. But I’ll settle for a cup of coffee.”
“Not a bad idea,” Phillip muttered.
Barnum raised an eyebrow. “I don’t think coffee’s going to cut it. Get some rest, Phillip. We can’t have you walking around here looking like that. You’ll scare the children.”
Lettie chuffed out a quiet laugh at Phillip’s eyeroll. “Yes, I’m the thing that’s going to have their mothers in a tizzy.” He prodded gently at the dark bruise at his temple, wincing. “But a few hours’ sleep, that does sound nice.”
“Nice for the both of you,” Lettie interjected. “Go home, you lot. I don’t need to play nursemaid to any more fools.”
“Well, Phillip,” Barnum chuckled as they got to their feet and he guided the younger man out of the tent, “you heard the woman.”
“And Barnum,” Lettie said, “if I see you poking around here before evening rehearsals, you’ll have a bruise,” she jerked her head in Phillip’s direction, “to match his.” At Barnum’s startled expression, she added, “Think you’re the only one around here who knows to pivot her hips when she throws a punch?”
She received no answer but wide eyes from Phillip and a beaming grin from Barnum, watched the two of them trudge out of the tent. “Morons,” she whispered under her breath. She stood for a moment, in the calm of a mess tent minutes away from being flooded by bustling cooks and ravenous oddities, until she caught her own eyelids drooping. “Better take your own advice, Lutz,” she muttered to herself.
She thought of little but her soft bed as she trudged into her caravan. She shut the door gently behind her, and laid herself down next to a warm, slumbering body.
“ ’vrything a’right?” Constantine murmured sleepily.
“Everything’s alright. We’ll be fine.” She yawned widely, closed her gritty eyes, shuffling in the sheets and pulling her favorite quilt up to her chin. “We’ll all be just fine.”