Nights at the Circus

Angela Carter
Part I
"Lor' love you, sir!" Fevvers sang out in a voice that clanged like dustbin lids. "As to my place of birth, why, I
first saw light of day right here in smoky old London, didn't I! Not billed the 'Cockney Venus', for nothing, sir,
though they could just as well 'ave called me 'Helen of the High Wire', due to the unusual circumstances in which I
come ashore -- for I never docked via what you might call the normal channels, sir, oh, dear me, no; but, just
like Helen of Troy, was hatched.

"Hatched out of a bloody great egg while Bow Bells rang, as ever is!"

The blonde guffawed uproariously, slapped the marbly thigh on which her wrap fell open and flashed
a pair of vast, blue, indecorous eyes at the young reporter with his open notebook and his poised pencil, as if to
dare him: "Believe it or not!"
 Fevvers, the most famous aerialiste of the day; her slogan, "Is she fact or is she fiction?" And she didn't let you
forget it for a minute; this query, in the French language, in foot-high letters, blazed forth from a wall-size poster,
souvenir of her Parisian triumphs, dominating her London dressing-room. Something hectic, something fittingly
impetuous and dashing about that poster, the preposterous depiction of a young woman shooting up like a
rocket, wheel in a burst of agitated sawdust towards an unseen trapeze somewhere above in the wooden
heavens of the Cirque d'Hiver. The artist had chosen to depict her ascent from behind -- bums aloft, you might say;
up she goes, in a steatopygous perspective, shaking out about her those tremendous red and purple pinions, pinions
large enough, powerful enough to bear up such a big girl as she. And she was a big girl.

Evidently this Helen took after her putative father, the swan, around the shoulder parts.

But these notorious and much-debated wings, the source of her fame, were stowed away for the night under
the soiled quilting of her baby-blue satin dressing-gown, where they made an uncomfortable- looking pair of
bulges, shuddering the surface of the taut fabric from time to time as if desirous of breaking loose. ("How
does she do that?" pondered the reporter.)
Then -- "a touch of sham?" -- she'd popped the cork of a chilled magnum of champagne between her teeth. A
hissing flute of bubbly stood beside her own elbow on the dressing-table, the still-crepitating bottle lodged
negligently in the toilet jug, packed in ice that must have come from a fishmonger's for a shiny scale or two stayed
trapped within the chunks. And this twice-used ice must surely be the source of the marine aroma -- something
fishy about the Cockney Venus -- that underlay the hot, solid composite of perfume, sweat, greasepaint and
raw, leaking gas that made you feel you breathed the air in Fevvers' dressing-room in lumps.

Heroine of the hour, object of learned discussion and profane surmise, this Helen launched a thousand quips, mostly
on the lewd side. ("Have you heard the one about how Fevvers got it up for the travelling salesman. . .") Her name
was on the lips of all, from duchess to costermonger: "Have you seen Fevvers?" And then: "How does she do it?"
And then: "Do you think she's real?"
His attempts to get rid of the damn' glass only succeeded in dislodging a noisy torrent of concealed billets doux,
bringing with them from the mantelpiece a writhing snakes' nest of silk stockings, green, yellow, pink, scarlet,
black, that introduced a powerful note of stale feet, final ingredient in the highly personal aroma, "essence of
Fevvers', that clogged the room. When she got round to it, she might well bottle the smell, and sell it. She never
missed a chance.

Perhaps the stockings had descended in order to make common cause with the other elaborately intimate garments,
wormy with ribbons, carious with lace, redolent of use, that she hurled round the room apparently at random during
the course of the many dressings and undressings which her profession demanded. A large pair of frilly drawers,
evidently fallen where they had light-heartedly been tossed, draped some object, clock or marble bust or funerary
urn, anything was possible since it was obscured completely. A redoubtable corset of the kind called an Iron Maiden
poked out of the empty coal scuttle like the pink husk of a giant prawn emerging from its den, trailing long laces
like several sets of legs. The room, in all, was a mistresspiece of exquisitely feminine squalor, sufficient, in its
homely way, to intimidate a young man who had led a less sheltered life than this one.
 His name was Jack Walser. Himself, he hailed from California, from the other side of a world all of whose four
corners he had knocked about for most of his five-and-twenty summers -- a picaresque career which rubbed off his
own rough edges; now he boasts the smoothest of manners and you would see in his appearance nothing of the
scapegrace urchin who, long ago, stowed away on a steamer bound from 'Frisco to Shanghai. In the course of his
adventuring, he discovered in himself a talent with words, and an even greater aptitude for finding himself in the
right place at the right time. So he stumbled upon his profession, and, at this time in his life, he filed copy to a New
York newspaper for a living, so he could travel wherever he pleased whilst retaining the privileged irresponsibility
of the journalist, the professional necessity to see all and believe nothing which cheerfully combined, in Walser's
personality, with a characteristically American generosity towards the brazen lie. His avocation suited him right
down to the ground on which he took good care to keep his feet. Call him Ishmael; but Ishmael with an expense
account, and, besides, a thatch of unruly flaxen hair, a ruddy, pleasant, square-jawed face and eyes the cool grey of
scepticism.

He would have called himself a "man of action". He subjected his life to a series of cataclysmic shocks because he
loved to hear his bones rattle. That was how he knew he was alive.
Since he was a good reporter, he was necessarily a connoisseur of the tall tale. So now he was in London he went to
talk to Fevvers, for a series of interviews tentatively entitled: "Great Humbugs of the World".

Free and easy as his American manners were, they met their match in those of the aerialiste, who now shifted
from one buttock to the other and -- "better out than in, sir" -- let a ripping fart ring round the room. She peered across
her shoulder, again, to see how he took that. Under the screen of her bonhomerie -- bonnnefemmerie? -- he noted she
was wary. He cracked her a white grin. He relished this commission!

Now all London lies beneath her flying feet; and, the very morning of this self-same October's day, in this very
dressing-room, here, in the Alhambra Music Hall, among her dirty underwear, has she not signed a six-figure contract
for a Grand Imperial Tour, to Russia and then Japan, during which she will astonish a brace of emperors? And, from
Yokohama, she will then ship to Seattle, for the start of a Grand Democratic Tour of the United States of America.

All across the Union, audiences clamour for her arrival, which will coincide with that of the new
century.

For we are at the fag-end, the smouldering cigar-butt, of a nineteenth century which is just about to be ground
out in the ashtray of history. It is the final, waning, season of the year of Our Lord, eighteen hundred and ninety nine.
And Fevvers has all the éclat of a new era about to take off.
Fevvers
At close quarters, it must be said that she looked more like a dray mare than an angel. At six feet two in her
stockings, she would have to give Walser a couple of inches in order to match him and, though they said she was
"divinely tall", there was, off-stage, not much of the divine about her unless there were gin palaces in heaven where
she might preside behind the bar. Her face, broad and oval as a meat dish, had been thrown on a common wheel out
of coarse clay; nothing subtle about her appeal

She chuckled with appreciation and topped herself up with such a lavish hand that foam spilled into her pot of dry
rouge, there to hiss and splutter in a bloody froth. It was impossible to imagine any gesture of hers that did not have
that kind of grand, vulgar, careless generosity about it; there was enough of her to go round, and some to spare.
"About your name. . ." Walser hinted, pencil at the ready.

She fortified herself with a gulp of champagne.

"When I was a baby, you could have distinguished me in a crowd of foundlings only by just this little bit of
down, of yellow fluff, on my back, on top of both my shoulderblades. Just like the fluff on a chick, it was. And she who
found me on the steps at Wapping, me in the laundry basket in which persons unknown left me, a little babe most
lovingly packed up in new straw sweetly sleeping among a litter of broken eggshells, she who stumbled over this poor,
abandoned creature clasped me at that moment in her arms out of the abundant goodness of her heart and took me
in.

"Where, indoors, unpacking me, unwrapping my shawl, witnessing the sleepy, milky, silky fledgling, all the girls
said: 'Looks like the little thing's going to sprout Fevvers!' Ain't that so, Lizzie," she appealed to her dresser.
On the stage of the Alhambra, when the curtain went up, there she was, prone in a feathery heap under this garment,
behind tinsel bars, while the band in the pit sawed and brayed away at "Only a bird in a gilded cage". How kitsch,
how apt the melody; it pointed up the element of the meretricious in the spectacle, reminded you the girl was
rumoured to have started her career in freak shows. (Check, noted Walser.) While the band played on, slowly,
slowly, she got to her knees, then to her feet, still muffled up in her voluminous cape, that crested helmet of red and
purple plumes on her head; she began to twist the shiny strings of her frail cage in a perfunctory way, mewing
faintly to be let out.

In her pink fleshings, her breastbone stuck out like the prow of a ship; the Iron Maiden cantilevered her bosom
whilst paring down her waist to almost nothing, so she looked as if she might snap in two at any careless
movement. The leotard was adorned with a spangle of sequins on her crotch and nipples, nothing else. Her hair was
hidden away under the dyed plumes that added a good eighteen inches to her already immense height. On her back
she bore an airy burden of furled plumage as gaudy as that of a Brazilian cockatoo. On her red mouth there was an
artificial smile.

Look at me! With a grand, proud, ironic grace, she exhibited herself before the eyes of the audience as if she were a
marvellous present too good to be played with. Look, not touch.
She rose up on tiptoe and slowly twirled round, giving the spectators a comprehensive view of her back: seeing is
believing. Then she spread out her superb, heavy arms in a backwards gesture of benediction and, as she did so, her
wings spread, too, a polychromatic unfolding fully six feet across, spread of an eagle, a condor, an albatross fed to
excess on the same diet that makes flamingoes pink.

Oooooooh! The gasps of the beholders sent a wind of wonder rippling through the theatre.

But Walser whimsically reasoned with himself, thus: now, the wings of the birds are nothing more than the
forelegs, or, as we should say, the arms, and the skeleton of a wing does indeed show elbows, wrists and fingers, all
complete. So, if this lovely lady is indeed, as her publicity alleges, a fabulous bird-woman, then she, by all the laws of
evolution and human reason, ought to possess no arms at all, for it's her arms that ought to be her wings!

Put it another way: would you believe a lady with four arms, all perfect, like a Hindu goddess, hinged on either
side of those shoulders of a voluptuous stevedore? Because, truly, that is the real nature of the physiological anomaly
in which Miss Fevvers is asking us to suspend disbelief.

Now, wings without arms is one impossible thing; but wings with arms is the impossible made doubly unlikely --
the impossible squared. Yes, sir!
 Yes, jumped. Jumped up to catch the dangling trapeze, jumped up some thirty feet in a single, heavy bound,
transfixed the while upon the arching white sword of the limelight. The invisible wire that must have hauled her up
remained invisible. She caught hold of the trapeze with one hand. Her wings throbbed, pulsed, then whirred, buzzed
and at last began to beat steadily on the air they disturbed so much that the pages of Walser's notebook ruffled over
and he temporarily lost his place, had to scramble to find it again, almost displaced his composure but managed to
grab tight hold of his scepticism just as it was about to blow over the ledge of the press box.

What made her remarkable as an aerialiste, however, was the speed -- or, rather the lack of it -- with which she
performed even the climactic triple somersault. When the hack aerialiste, the everyday, wingless variety, performs
the triple somersault, he or she travels through the air at a cool sixty miles an hour; Fevvers, however, contrived a
contemplative and leisurely twenty-five, so that the packed theatre could enjoy the spectacle, as in slow motion, of
every tense muscle straining in her Rubenesque form. The music went much faster than she did; she dawdled.
Indeed, she did defy the laws of projectiles, because a projectile cannot mooch along its trajectory; if it slackens its
speed in mid-air, down it falls. But Fevvers, apparently, pottered along the invisible gangway between her trapezes
with the portly dignity of a Trafalgar Square pigeon flapping from one proffered handful of corn to another, and
then she turned head over heels three times, lazily enough to show off the crack in her bum.
She gave him a queer look, as if she suspected he were teasing and, sooner or later, she would remember to pay him
back for it, but her mouth was too full for a riposte as she tucked into this earthiest, coarsest cabbies' fare with
gargantuan enthusiasm. She gorged, she stuffed herself, she spilled gravy on herself, she sucked up peas from
the knife; she had a gullet to match her size and table manners of the Elizabethan variety. Impressed, Walser
waited with the stubborn docility of his profession until at last her enormous appetite was satisfied; she wiped her
lips on her sleeve and belched. She gave him another queer look, as if she half hoped the spectacle of her gluttony
would drive him away, but, since he remained, notebook on knee, pencil in hand, sitting on her sofa, she sighed,
belched again, and continued:

"So there I was," she went on, after an invigorating gulp. "I was a tableau vivant from the age of seven
on. There I sat above the company --"

"-- as if she were the guardian cherub of the house --"

"-- and for seven long years, sir, I was nought but the painted, gilded sign of love, and you might
say, that so it was I served my apprenticeship in being looked at -- at being the object of the eye of
the beholder.
Sprouting feathers
"I spread," said Fevvers. "I had taken off my little white nightgown in order to perform my matutinal ablutions at
my little dresser when there was a great ripping in the hind-quarters of my chemise and, all unwilled by me,
uncalled for, involuntarily, suddenly there broke forth my peculiar inheritance -- these wings of mine! Still
adolescent, as yet, not half their adult size, and moist, sticky, like freshly unfurled foliage on an April tree. But, all
the same, wings.

"No. There was no pain. Only bewilderment."

"She lets out a great shriek," said Lizzie, "that brought me up out of a dream -- for I shared the attic with her,
sir -- and there she stood, stark as a stone, her ripped chemise around her ankles, and I would have thought I was
still dreaming or else have died and gone to heaven, among the blessed angels; or, that she was the Annunciation of
my menopause."
The pure Child of the Century
'Oh, my little one, I think you must be the pure child of the century that just now is waiting in the wings, the
New Age in which no women will be bound down to the ground.' And then she wept. That night, we threw away
the bow and arrow and I posed, for the first time, as the Winged Victory, for, as you can see, I am designed on the
grand scale and, even at fourteen, you could have made two Lizzies out of me.
The whorehouse
"It was one of those old, square, red-brick houses with a plain, sober façade and a graceful, scallop-shaped fanlight
over the front door that you may still find in those parts of London so far from the tide of fashion that they were
never swept away. You could not look at Mother Nelson's house without the thought, how the Age of Reason
built it; and then you almost cried, to think the Age of Reason was over before it properly begun, and this
harmonious relic tucked away behind the howling of the Ratcliffe Highway, like the germ of sense left in a
drunkard's mind.

"A little flight of steps ran up to the front door, steps that Lizzie, faithful as any housewife in London,
scrubbed and whitened every morning. An air of rectitude and propriety surrounded the place, with its tall
windows over which we always kept the white blinds pulled down, as if its eyes were closed, as if the house were
dreaming its own dream, or as if, on entering between the plain and well-proportioned pediments of the doorway,
you entered a place that, like its mistress, turned a blind eye to the horrors of the outside, for, inside, was a place of
privilege in which those who visited might extend the boundaries of their experience for a not unreasonable sum. It
was a place in which rational desires might be rationally gratified; it was an old-fashioned house, so much so
that, in those years, it had a way of seeming almost too modern for its own good, as the past so often does when it
outruns the present.
"Lovely or not, Ma Nelson always expressed complete satisfaction with my turnout and soon took to calling me, not
her 'Winged Victory' but her 'Victory with Wings', the spiritual flagship of her fleet, as if a virgin with a weapon was
the fittest guardian angel for a houseful of whores. Yet it may be that a large woman with a sword is not the best
advertisement for a brothel. For, slow but sure, trade fell off from my fourteenth birthday on .

"I put it down to the influence of Baudelaire, sir."

"What's this?" cried Walser, amazed enough to drop his professional imperturbability.

"The French poet, sir; a poor fellow who loved whores not for the pleasure of it but, as he perceived it, the horror of
it, as if we was, not working women doing it for money but damned souls who did it solely to lure men to their dooms, as if
we'd got nothing better to do. . . Yet we were all suffragists in that house; oh, Nelson
"As for myself, I worked my passage on Ma Nelson's ship as living statue, and, during my blossoming years, from
fourteen to seventeen, I existed only as an object in men's eyes after the night-time knocking on the door
began. Such was my apprenticeship for life, since is it not to the mercies of the eyes of others that we commit
ourselves on our voyage through the world? I was as if closed up in a shell, for the wet white would harden on
my face and torso like a death mask that covered me all over, yet, inside this appearance of marble, nothing could
have been more vibrant with potentiality than I! Sealed in this artificial egg, this sarcophagus of beauty, I waited, I
waited. . . although I could not have told you for what it was I waited. Except, I assure you, I did not await the kiss
of a magic prince, sir! With my two eyes, I nightly saw how such a kiss would seal me up in my appearance
for ever!
Women monsters
So he was a connoisseur of degradation and always maintained it was those fine gentlemen who paid down their sovereigns to poke and pry at us
who were the unnatural ones, not we. For what is 'natural' and 'unnatural', sir? The mould in which the human form is cast is exceedingly fragile.

"Tell 'im about the Sleeping Beauty," she prompted.

"Oh, what a tragic case, sir! She was a country curate's daughter and bright and merry as a grig, until, one morning in
her fourteenth year, the very day her menses started, she never wakened, not until noon; and the day after, not until
teatime;

"Though so diminutive in stature, the Wonder was as perfectly formed as any of those avatars of hers, [...] "So I says to her: 'Wonder,
why do you degrade yourself by working in this house, which is truly a house of shame, when you could earn a good living on the
boards?' 'Ah, Fevvers,' she replies, 'I'd rather show myself to one man at a time than to an entire theatre-full of the horrid, nasty, hairy
things, and, here, I'm well protected from the dark, foul throng of the world, in which I suffered so much. Amongst the monsters, I am
well hidden; who looks for a leaf in a forest?'
 "But Fanny was another kettle of fish, a big, raw-boned, plain-spoken hearty lass from Yorkshire whom you would have
passed in the street without a second look but for the good cheer of roses in her cheeks and the spring of health in her
step. When Madame Schreck pulled back the curtain on Fanny, there she'd stand, a bonny lump of a girl with nowt on but a
shift, and a blindfold.

"And Schreck would say: 'Look at him, Fanny.' So Fanny would take off her blindfold and give him a beaming smile.

"Then Madame Schreck would say: 'I said, look at him, Fanny.' At which she'd pull up her shift.

"For, where she should have had nipples, she had eyes.

Then Madame Schreck would say: 'Look at him properly, Fanny.' Then those two other eyes of hers would open.

They were a shepherd's blue, same as the eyes in her head; not big, but very bright.

"I asked her once, what did she see with those mamillary eyes, and she says: 'Why, same as with the top ones but lower
down.' Yet I do think, for all her free, open disposition, she saw too much of the world altogether and that is why she'd
come to rest with all us other dispossessed creatures, for whom there was no earthly use, in this lumber room of femininity,
this rag-and-bone shop of the heart.
 "And what did you do?" asked Walser, chewing his pencil.

"Myself? The part I played in Madame Schreck's chamber of imaginary horrors? The Sleeping Beauty lay stark
naked on a marble slab and I stood at her head, full spread. I am the tombstone angel, I am the Angel of Death.

"Only a branched candlestick cast sombre light and shadow over Beauty sleeping on her bier and I stooping over, with my
bent wings and my sword, Death the Protectress, you see. So if any of 'em does try to get up to anything not on the tariff, I
can rap 'em over the knuckles there and then. As for Beauty, she sighed and murmured and all the time knew nothing, but I
would watch the shivering wretch who had hired the use of the idea of us approach her as if she were the execution block
and, like Hamlet, I would think: 'What a wonderful piece of work is man!'
Christian Rosencreutz
The figure engraved on this medallion was that of a pardon my French member, sir, of the male variety; that is, a phallus, in the condition known in
heraldry as rampant, and there were little wings attached to the ballocks thereof, which caught my eye immediately. Around the shaft of this virile
member twined the stem of a rose whose bloom nestled somewhat coyly at the place where the foreskin folded back. Whether the thing was ancient
or modern I could not tell, but it represented a heavy investment.

" 'Don't you run away with the idea there's anything fleshly, indecent or even remotely corporeal about our meeting this night of all
nights, when the shining star lies in the moon's chaste embrace above this very house, signifying the divine post-diluvian Remission and
Reconciliation of the Terrible, for there is a secret admonition of which the motto of pure courtesy is an obfuscation. For it is not: "Honi
soit qui mal y pense", but "Yoni soit qui mal y pense", yoni, of course, in the Hindu, the female part, or absence, or atrocious hole,
or dreadful chasm, the Abyss, Down Below, the vortex that sucks everything dreadfully down, down, down where Terror
rules. . ."

"So that was the signification of his gold medallion! The penis, represented by itself, aspires upwards, represented by the wings,
but is dragged downwards, represented by the twining stem, by the female part, represented by the rose. H'm. This is some kind of
heretical possibly Manichean version of neo-Platonic Rosicrucianism, thinks I to myself; tread carefully, girlie! I exort myself.
 " 'Flora!' he cries. 'Quick spirit of the awakening world! Winged, and aspiring upwards! Flora; Azrael; Venus Pandemos!
These are but a few of the many names with which I might honour my goddess, but, tonight, I shall call you "Flora", very
often, for do you not know what night it is, Flora?'

"I try a dollop of his excellent Stilton, pondering as I savour it the baroque eclecticism of his mythology.

" 'April thirtieth,' I says, suspicious lest this turns out to be another riddle.

" 'May eve, Flora, mia,' he assures me. 'In but a few moments, it will be your day, the green hinge of the year. The
door of spring will open up to let summer through. It will be the merry morning of May!'
"You must know this gentleman's name!" insisted Fevvers and, seizing his notebook, wrote it down. She had a fine,
firm, flowing Italic hand. On reading it:

"Good God," said Walser.

"I saw in the paper only yesterday how he gives the most impressive speech in the House on the subject of
Votes for Women. Which he is against. On account of how women are of a different soul-substance from men, cut
from a different bolt of spirit cloth, and altogether too pure and rarefied to be bothering their pretty little heads with
things of this world, such as the Irish question and the Boer War.
'Queen of ambiguities, goddess of in-between states, being on the borderline of species, manifestation of Arioriph,
Venus, Achamatoth, Sophia.' [...]

" 'Lady of the hub of the celestial wheel, creature half of earth and half of air, virgin and whore, reconciler of
fundament and firmament, reconciler of opposing states through the mediation of your ambivalent body , reconciler
of the grand opposites of death and life, you who come to me neither naked nor clothed, wait with me for the hour when it
is neither dark nor light, that of dawn before daybreak, when you shall give yourself to me but I shall not possess you.'

"Give yourself, that's rich! I thought, considering the amounts of money changing hands. But I outwardly adopted a
submissive stance and asked in a humble voice: 'How shall I do that, oh, great sage?'

" 'The rest of the riddle you must answer at the appointed hour,' he intones. So I had to make do with that.
The women set out for the smoky south over Westminster Bridge against the clattering traffic that now streamed into town.
Because of the difference in their heights, they could not walk arm in arm, so they held hands and, from a distance, looked
like a blonde, heroic mother taking her little daughter home from some ill-fated expedition up west, their ages
obscured, their relationship inverted. Their feet dragged slow as poverty yet that, too, was an illusion; pelted with
diamonds, assaulted by pearls, she was too mean to take a cab.
 And so our journeyings commenced again, as if they were second nature. Young as I am, it's been a picaresque life; will there be no end to it? Is
my fate to be a female Quixote, with Liz my Sancho Panza? If so, what of the young American? Will he turn out to be the beautiful illusion, the
Dulcinea of that sentimentality for which Liz upbraids me, telling me it's but the obverse to my enthusiasm for hard cash?

"You don't know the first thing about the human heart," said Liz dolefully. "The heart is a treacherous organ and you're nothing if not impetuous. I
fear for you, Sophie. Selling yourself is one thing and giving yourself away is quite another but, oh, Sophie! what if you rashly throw yourself
away? Then what happens to that unique 'me-ness' of yours? On the scrap-heap, that's what happens to it! I raised you up to fly to the heavens, not
to brood over a clutch of eggs!"
"Think of him, not as a lover, but as a scribe, as an amanuensis," she said to Lizzie. "And not of my trajectory, alone, but of
yours, too, Lizzie; of your long history of exile and cunning which you've scarcely hinted to him, which will fill up ten times
more of his notebooks than my story ever did. Think of him as the amanuensis of all those whose tales we've yet to tell
him, the histories of those woman who would otherwise go down nameless and forgotten, erased from history as if they
had never been, so that he, too, will put his poor shoulder to the wheel and help to give the world a little turn into the new
era that begins tomorrow.

"And once the old world has turned on its axle so that the new dawn can dawn, then, ah, then! all the women will
have wings, the same as I. This young woman in my arms, whom we found tied hand and foot with the grisly bonds of
ritual, will suffer no more of it; she will tear off her mind forg'd manacles, will rise up and fly away. The dolls' house doors
will open, the brothels will spill forth their prisoners, the cages, gilded or otherwise, all over the world, in every land, will let
forth their inmates singing together the dawn chorus of the new, the transformed --"

"It's going to be more complicated than that," interpolated Lizzie. "This old witch sees storms ahead, my girl. When I
look to the future, I see through a glass, darkly. You improve your analysis, girl, and then we'll discuss it."
 "Fevvers, only the one question. . . why did you go to such lengths, once upon a time, to convince me you were the
'only fully-feathered intacta in the history of the world'?" She began to laugh.

"I fooled you, then!" she said. "Gawd, I fooled you!" She laughed so much the bed shook.

"You mustn't believe what you write in the papers!" she assured him, stuttering and hiccupping with mirth. "To
think I fooled you!"

Her laughter spilled out of the window and made the tin ornaments on the tree outside the god-hut shake and
tinkle [...]

The spiralling tornado of Fevvers' laughter began to twist and shudder across the entire globe, as if a spontaneous
response to the giant comedy that endlessly unfolded beneath it, until everything that lived and breathed, everywhere,
was laughing. Or so it seemed to the deceived husband, who found himself laughing too, even if he was not quite sure
whether or not he might be the butt of the joke. Fevvers, sputtering to a stop at last, crouched above him, covering his
face with kisses. Oh, how pleased with him she was!

To think I really fooled you!" she marvelled. "It just goes to show there's nothing like confidence."