Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter

eyes, comes a rat-a-tat-tat on the doorknocker and, lo and behold, it’s the telegraph boy.
    ‘And what have the twanging wires brought her? Why, a husband! For the message reads: “One death brings on another, or so they say, and my wife just dropped anchor in the same port as the Admiral.” (He always called Ma Nelson, the Admiral.) “Jennifer-gentle, be mine in sight of God and Man! Signed, Lord –”’
    ‘Muck,’ interpolated Lizzie, with a leaden and ironic discretion.
    ‘Lord Muck,’ agreed Fevvers reflectively. ‘So let us call ’im, for you’d be very much surprised, sir, if I told you his name and you looked him up in Burke’s Peerage. Now, as they say, no two deaths without a third follows. Well, married they were and a very refined affair it was, in St John’s, Smith Square, she in off-white because he’d given out she is a provincial widow. And, afterwards, at the reception, which was held in the Savoy Hotel, nothing but the best –’
    ‘– he chokes to death on the bombe surprise ,’ said Lizzie, and emitted a sudden, fierce cackle, for which Fevvers reproved her with a look.
    ‘So she comes into thirty thousand a year, a place up in Yorkshire, another in Scotland, and a very nice house in Eaton Square, into the bargain. And our little duck would have been sitting pretty except she was a sentimental soul and grieved a good deal over the departed as, ever the optimist, she’d counted on a long and happy life with the old bugger.’
    ‘Only a whore,’ opined Lizzie with sudden force, ‘could hope for so much from marriage.’
    ‘Black did become our Jenny, as she is red-headed, and, in her mourning, she decided to take herself off to Monte Carlo, to have a bit of a flutter at the tables, it being November and bad weather at home and, if she’d a weakness, it was gambling. So she’s sitting at the tables, in black by Worth, wearing only the most reticently widowed of her diamonds –’
    ‘– when she catches the eye of a gentleman from Chicago who makes sewing-machines –’
    ‘– you don’t mean –’ interjected Walser.
    ‘Indeed.’
    Walser tapped his teeth with his pencil tip, faced with the dilemma of the first checkable fact they’d offered him and the impossibility of checking it. Cable Mrs – III and ask her if she’d ever worked in a brothel run by a one-eyed whore named Nelson? Contracts had been taken out for less!
    Fevvers and Lizzie now sighed in unison.
    ‘However, I understand this Husband Number Two ain’t feeling any too chipper, these days. Poor girl, one wonders,’ Lizzie intoned, poker-faced, ‘whether all his millions will console her for her loss.’
    Fevvers let her left eyelid droop briefly over her left eye.
    ‘As for Esmeralda,’ resumed Fevvers, ‘she’d tootled away on her flute to such effect that one of Ma Nelson’s regulars, a gentleman in the theatrical profession whom she knew well, chooses this aptest of moments to send a special messenger to say he’d fixed her up with an act in which she charms a snake out of a laundry basket, this snake, as it turns out, being a young man of handsome appearance and preternatural physical agility professionally known as the Human Eel. Esmeralda appearing clad in a tigerskin and Greek sandals for this number. So hers turned out to be a magic flute and this very artistic act has toured Britain and Europe to great applause.
    ‘And the Human Eel soon contrives to wriggle his way into Esmeralda’s affections to such an extent they’ve now a brace of little elvers of their own, bless their hearts, to which Liz and I stood godmothers, sir.’
    ‘We two were not left homeless, either. Over the years, Fevvers and I had put all our earnings and our tips into my sister’s business and there was a room ready and waiting for us with her. So there we decided to retreat, where we could “recoil in order to jump better”, as the French say. My sister, Isotta. Best ice-cream in London, sir. Best cassata