Jenny and Barnum (12 page)

Down below, the tiny gimbaled kerosene lanterns were adjusted low, the flames so small he could hardly see the swinging of the lamps themselves. In the shadows Anna Swan was braced against the back of the settee, her huge legs stretching across the full width of the sole of the salon, her feet set against a locker. Everywhere belowdecks was the smell of human sickness. Anna looked conscious, but not as if she wanted to be disturbed. All she wanted was deliverance. Given what she went through every day of her life, she did not need him to remind her that, with her weight, she had to be careful how she pushed against the bulkheads.

In their cabin Chang and Eng were lying side by side on the lower bunk, neither one of them looking very well. Neither of them looked at Tom Thumb either: when they were like this, the two of them disappeared into their own woebegone world.

When Tom Thumb knocked on Lavinia's door, it occurred to him that Joe Gallagher could be on the other side—Captain Ross had suggested nothing less, after all.

“Charlie?”

“Yeah, it's me.”

“Come on.” She had a blanket over her; he could hardly see her in the light of the one small swinging lamp. “I was hoping you'd come down. We're going to be all right, aren't we?”

“Sure.” He waited until the motion of the boat carried him to the bunk. “Captain Ross says this happens all the time in these waters. Half the weather in the world comes together here, I've told you that.”

“I'm scared, Charlie.”

“It's all part of seasickness. It's a bad storm, all right, but the crew has seen worse—sailed through worse, in smaller boats, all of them.”

She took his hand. “There's no point in getting up, is there?”

She hated the idea of missing anything. “No,” he said, “there's nothing to see.”

She closed her eyes. “You always take care of me, Charlie.”

“I try.”

“I'll be all right.” That meant she was going to sleep. She trusted him—she thought he knew a lot. One thing he believed he had over Joe Gallagher was that Lavinia loved everything about the world General Tom Thumb, her Charlie, had shown her. She thought he was perfectly at home in it, comfortable and happy. “You're always a gentleman, Charlie,” she used to tell him all the time, when they were first falling in love.

He waited until the boat's motion could carry him to the other side of the cabin, and then he let himself out. Being with her had made him forget the danger they were in. He liked to think he had reserved his decision on God—appropriate enough, he thought, for a man sentenced to spend a lifetime looking others in the kneecaps—but he did not want to think he was headed for oblivion, not so ignominiously, certainly not so soon. He was afraid, all right—now he
knew
he was afraid.

Gallagher had locked their cabin. Tom Thumb had a key, even if the darkness and the rocking of the boat made getting it in the lock difficult.

The smell of sickness—and liquor, Tom Thumb realized suddenly—was much stronger in here. The lamp was out. He struck a match, figuring Gallagher had grabbed the lower bunk and a route would have to be found to the upper. No, Gallagher was up there. Tom Thumb shook out the match, his finger tips smarting. The boat rolled again, and threw him onto the lower bunk, where his hands skidded through something cold, wet, and sticky.

It took him a moment to understand what it was, and in the moment after that, in the darkness, soiled with a drunk's vomit, General Tom Thumb lost all control. He
screamed!
He stood up on the bunk, punched upward—and hit his hand on solid wood. He grabbed at the sideboard and tried to pull himself up into the upper bunk.

“Get down from there, you pig! You damned disgusting pig! Get down from there!”

“What? What the hell ya doin'?”

Gallagher was still drunk, or drunker than ever! Tom Thumb punched at him, swinging his arm up over the sideboard, grabbing at Gallagher's jacket.

“Hey, cut it out! Hey!”

The boat heaved back. Tom Thumb had Gallagher's jacket, and suddenly Gallagher came flying over Thumb's head and crashed down on the cabin sole. Tom Thumb was down on top of him, wiping his hands on Gallagher's back.

“You goddamn pig, you took the good bunk after you threw up in the other! You couldn't tell me? You couldn't clean up after yourself? You're nothing but a goddamn drunk!”

Joe Gallagher groaned. “You broke my arm! You broke my arm!”

“What?”

“It's broke! My arm is broke! I'm going to die because of you!”

Tom Thumb almost giggled. Gallagher was wailing like a baby! Tom Thumb climbed over him and got to the bottom of the companionway. The sea was more violent than ever.

“We've had an accident down here!”

Captain Ross appeared out of the gloom above. “What kind of accident?”

In the salon, Anna Swan moaned.

“The other guy fell out of his bunk. He says his arm is broke!”

Captain Ross chuckled. “Hell of a time to break a man's arm, General! Is the bone sticking out?”

“What's going on?”

“Nothing, Lavinia. Joe fell out of his bunk.”

“My arm is broken! And I didn't fall! He pulled me out of the bunk on purpose.”

She moved to look at his arm but lost her balance and fell against him. He yowled and shrank back.

“Tell him to get up here!” Captain Ross yelled.

“What did you do to him?” Lavinia cried.

“He pulled me out of the bunk while I was asleep, that's what he did,” Gallagher cried. Murphy reached down from the pilothouse to try to grab Gallagher by the broken arm and Gallagher recoiled.

“Give me the good one,” Murphy grunted.

Gallagher still looked like a man afraid he was going to die. Lavinia pulled at Tom Thumb's shoulder.

“What did you
do
to him? I want you to tell me
now!
'

He held out his hands. “He got sick in the lower bunk and then left it there for me. I put my hands in it. Who was supposed to clean up after him? I was hitting him when he fell out of the bunk—no, I'm not going to lie, because I'm not ashamed. I pulled him out, just as he said. I'm sorry he didn't land on his oversized head!”

Lavinia was staring at him in horror when from above Gallagher let out a tortured squawk. Tom Thumb clambered up the companionway, pulling Lavinia after him. Captain Ross's face glowed with suppressed mirth. Murphy was flushed with embarrassment.

“Well, look at his damned twisted arms, Captain, and tell me which one is broken and which isn't!”

It was true. Gallagher's arms were so misshapen normally that you could not tell if they were broken or not. The fact was, Tom Thumb
still
didn't know which arm was broken. Now white water crashed over the pilothouse, and the starboard gunwale plowed deep into the foam. Lavinia clawed at Tom Thumb's coat to keep her balance. She could see the expressions of the men—there was no doubt about the danger they were in. Another wave rolled at them, a thirty-foot churning mountain. Captain Ross spun the wheel into it. The ketch climbed up to the top—and plunged fifty feet down the other side, spinning like a child's toy. When Tom Thumb looked around, Murphy was holding Gallagher by the collar in mid-air, Gallagher kicking for a foothold on the locker, holding his left arm.

“You midgets get below!” Captain Ross roared. “Strap yourselves in your bunks! Murphy, put that one on top of the locker and pray he don't come down and break his other damned arm while you're helping them down the companionway.”

Tom Thumb was stung. “Send
him
below! At least I know what's expected of me up here!”

Captain Ross's eyes bulged with rage. “The man can't tend to himself! If I don't tend to him, I'll have to answer to Her Majesty's Commission! Now you go below, or I'll slap you in irons!”

Murphy hefted the humiliated Tom Thumb down the companionway. Where was the justice? The sea had thrown Gallagher out of the bunk—or had done most of the work. Gallagher was the one responsible for his own misfortune, having violated the absolute minimum standards for common sense and decency. It wasn't his misfortune now anyway, it was Tom Thumb's, for Lavinia took advantage of the boat's rolling to push past him and into her cabin. He moved quickly and was able to block the door with his foot.

“Look out or I'll break
your
leg!”

“How would you like to put your hands in that stuff? The only reason he got sick was because he was drinking.”

“Everybody's sick on this boat. Even if he was drunk, that wouldn't give you the right to break his arm!”

“I didn't! He fell out of the bunk!”

She glared. “That's not what you said. You were hitting him. You don't deny it.”

“You're looking for an excuse,” Tom Thumb muttered.

“What did you say?”

“You're looking for an excuse! That's what I said! I've been watching you! You can't stay away from him! He's just a drunken bum, but you're like a moth around a flame!”

She ground her teeth. “I thought you were done with that. You
told
me you were done with that. But you've been walking around with dirty thoughts in your head. You've been thinking those things while we've been together. You keep away from me. You have a dirty mind and it makes me feel cheap. I don't want to see you any more.” She closed the door and locked it.

A wave knocked Tom Thumb into a bulkhead, numbing his nose. He couldn't tell if it was bleeding. Nothing would surprise him now. What had happened to him in the last five minutes seemed like a dream—a nightmare. He wasn't going to believe that Lavinia meant the things she had said. He'd made a mistake, lashing out at her the way he had, but that had come out of the emotion of the moment, nothing he had planned in advance.

The same with her—it had to be. She would calm down. If Tom Thumb could have planned anything, it would have been to keep his mouth shut.

He hit his head getting into his cabin. The storm was getting worse—there was no limit to how bad a storm at sea could get. And Tom Thumb had to spend possibly his last night on earth surrounded by the sick, drunken smell of the man he hated most.

The storm lasted all night, screaming and shrieking its worst in the black hours before dawn. The ketch went over not just on its side, but twenty degrees beyond the horizontal, so that the masts and the top of the pilothouse were deep in the water. Tom Thumb had never seen such weather. Everybody was screaming. He checked on Anna Swan, then Chang and Eng, but Lavinia's door remained locked.

“It's me—Charlie,” he called. “Are you all right?”

“They told you to strap yourself to your bunk,” came the muffled reply. “Don't go looking for trouble.”

For the next four hours the boat was heeled over so far that Tom Thumb could not climb to the lower bunk, much less the upper. He fell asleep where he sat, with his back against the bulkhead.

In the morning the master of a passing fishing vessel informed them they had been blown north of Norwich—but that they could consider themselves lucky, because wreckage was being sighted everywhere, wreckage and corpses, surging restlessly toward the shore. With no damage and a favorable wind, Captain Ross and his crew did not get inside the Thames Estuary until well after dark, and had to drop anchor almost within view of the London docks. They were exhausted. Gallagher's arm was as big as a rye bread, and no one doubted that he was in real pain. Murphy kept him in a stupor with gin broken out of ship's stores. Lavinia took care of Anna Swan, who, confined as she was to the salon, needed a bucket for her various personal needs. Anna was hungry and could not eat and fell to weeping uncontrollably again. Sweeping past Tom Thumb's cabin in silence, Lavinia brought food to Chang, who was able to eat only while Eng slept.

Tom Thumb finally took to his room, so depressed that he did not come out the next morning until the rest of the party had cleared the dock, Joe Gallagher going directly to the hospital. It was all Tom Thumb could do to say good-by to Captain Ross and his crew. He did not know how he was going to be able to speak to anybody again—but it was already Thursday, and Tom Thumb had an appointment in John Hall Wilton's offices in Chancery Lane.

The meeting with Judge Munthe of Stockholm wasn't scheduled until the middle of the afternoon, but as tired as Tom Thumb was, he could not rest—he dared not go to the meeting unprepared. The simple fact was, the Jenny Lind Tom Thumb was coming to know through what was apparently the common knowledge of Europe was a person altogether different from the saint of Barnum's description or the shy maiden in Tom Thumb's own first impression.

Lavinia was only one of Tom Thumb's informants. Whatever he had seen in Vienna notwithstanding, all those self-conscious uncertainties and seeming nervous diffidences, it was now clear that Jenny Lind was no Joan of Arc. The list of men known or rumored to have fallen in love with her included some of the most famous names of Europe, composers, singers, musicians-Felix Mendelssohn, Adolf Lindblad, Hans Andersen, an Italian tenor, a German baritone, and, oddly, an obscure English army officer, once her fiancé. Lind had been engaged to the baritone, too, running away from both gentlemen just weeks before the wedding dates. The jilted pair were still in love with her, as were all the rest, apparently. The Italian tenor remained a problem, having made a spectacle of himself so many times that even the public now took him for a joke.

Jenny Lind was a madwoman who precipitated all her woes anyway, Tom Thumb judged; she had to stay friends with all her former suitors—save Andersen, apparently one of Europe's great lunatics; in any case, she really did not do that well with the whole spectrum of writers, who were suspicious of her—rightfully, Tom Thumb thought. Jenny Lind had lived in the home of Lindblad, the Swedish composer, and his wife, and the Mendelssohns, each time falling in love with the man of the house, seemingly innocent and unknowing—or so the gossip had it. Lindblad in particular had had a very bad time, so beguiled by her “innocent” love and tormented by guilt over what he was doing to his wife, that his friends had feared for him.