Free Circus by Claire Battershill Page A

have made a very sensible choice for a vacation spot at this time of year: who wouldn’t prefer a light shower over a swooning heat?
    During their excursion, Barnaby bought Jemima an ice cream sandwich wrapped in wax paper from an enterprising fisherman who kept an icebox full of confections. Then he lifted her up and spun her around until the sea and the horizon teeter-tottered and the ice cream made its way back out of Jemima and onto an unsuspecting passerby. That’s when Barnaby himself stumbled and fell into a chuckling heap at her feet. Instead of getting up he lay down flat on his back in the middle of the dock, looked up at the clouds, and invited Jemima to join him. Mrs. Low from the post office had to step carefully over Barnaby’s body in order to get her basket of halibut safely to shore. Such public shenanigans were unheard of on the Landing before Barnaby’s arrival, and Mrs. Hendricks in particular was adamant that something must be done before he ruined the family’s good name.
    The Hendricks did, however, approve of Jemima’s other new hobby. The dollhouse was quiet and relatively tidy, and kept her inside, right where they could keep an eye on her. She would take out the scissors, Q-tips, and glue from a dedicated section in her mother’s sewing box and set up her craft station by the fire in the drawing room after dinner. As she stitched and glued, her parents would snuggle on the loveseat, rubbing noses, which was the closest they ever got to expressing physical affection in front of their daughter. Jemima found it somehow more embarrassing than actual kissing.
    I sometimes wonder what would have happened if Barnabystayed to whisk Jemima away on more seaside adventures. Would she have given up miniatures after that first dollhouse? Wouldn’t you, if you had a jolly uncle to play with? Jemima wrote in her diary that Barnaby promised to take her dogsled-ding in the Great White North, snorkelling in the Caribbean, and around the world in a hot air balloon. The voyages he promised had not even occurred to her before, growing up as she did in a pre-television, pre-Internet era here in Dithers, where she attended the one-room schoolhouse across from the cannery. But Barnaby did vanish, as was his way, and so instead of riding camels in Constantinople, or floating across the Atlantic ocean with a steamer trunk, she was left with just the frame of a wooden house and the bare outlines of its inhabitants. Sometimes I can’t help but think she spent her life building and rebuilding that summer out of materials she could shape with her own hands.
    So, why don’t we move along to the next room? Directly beneath the attic is the nursery. As you can see, there are two babies here. The twins. I call them Jessica and Mary-Beth. An interesting fact about miniature babies is that they don’t have bodies. They consist only of porcelain heads, swaddled in handmade cloths. The swaddling garments are constructed by splitting a single length of yarn into several individual threads and knitting them together in the usual purl-knit stocking stitch. You can tell that the babies are fraternal rather than identical twins because Mary-Beth has blue eyes and Jessica’s are green. Well, you do have to look
very
closely, yes, but theyare definitely different. The nurse sits in a corner, reading a book of ABCs, presumably aloud, for the edification of the infants. Imagine how well behaved the babies must be for the nurse to be able to relax like that! The pink paisley wallpaper in this room was chosen by Megan Cunningham, Jemima’s dearest childhood friend, who frequently donated supplies to Jemima’s work throughout her life. Mrs. Cunningham remains a trustee on the board of this museum to this day and is often consulted on historical matters. Like many witnesses, she has her own biases. The museum needs to keep her happy, of course, but she’s not the best person to ask about Jemima’s adult life: in fact, they were