Lord Morgan's Cannon Read Free

would practice their chosen art; juggling knives or checking the knots on the ropes of the trapeze they hoped to one day master. The hire-wire girls would flirt and giggle, always living for today, but never doing enough to catch the eye of the Ring Master, who would sit in the open, on a folding chair, with a whisky and his cane, counting the advance tickets for each evening’s performance, calculating just how extravagant it would have to be to turn a profit.
    The animals were housed together, their wagons in a circle, ready to be unleashed and walked down the grassy stretch and in through the curtains of the big tent.
    That day, Doris stood outside the anteater’s cage, her right front foot chained to a willow tree that somehow grew away from water. Being a good, loyal elephant, who had never yet hurt a clown, she was allowed a ten-metre chain. The circus boys figured she was experienced enough not to circle the tree, and they even put down two bales of hay for her to toss and taste if she got bored of the cocksfoot and common bent grasses under her wide, grey feet.
    The mosquitoes were too small to bother her, and she ignored the crows that occasionally landed, trying to peck at her back. She stood as she often did that English spring, gently swaying, as she explored the vertical bars of the cage. Being an Indian elephant, she had two lips on her trunk and she used both to probe the bars and the gaps between, seeing if there was room to squeeze through and touch the anteater, who appeared to be either dead, or sleeping, a motionless ball of spiky black and white lying still on tar-covered planks.
    She searched and snaffled, sometimes blowing on to her friend’s body before returning to her hay, and swaying again, occasionally considering whether to place her head against the cage, and lean in, tipping it off its trailer. But she had seen it all before. So as the sun descended, she took to kicking up a dirt pile, and flicking a little over her back.
    Doris didn’t notice Bessie flying into the anteater’s cage, alighting silently next to his weeping nose. Nor did she see Bessie bob down, her tiny tongue dipping into a tear the anteater had silently shed, tasting it for salt. The anteater stirred, slowly opening his sorrowful eyes, and he dragged a paw across the cage, his claws etching another four lines into its timber. He pulled himself to his senses, and spoke, quietly, seriously, but without substance.
    “I can’t go on,” he said.
    The anteater was only seven years old, young for his kind, even among those kept in circuses. His neck was thickening beyond his head, his tail growing bushy and long, yet he hadn’t developed an eye for the best ant hills. Like many captive anteaters, his spectacles were strapped to his tiny ears for show. But he was already exhausted, whipped into submission.
    Bessie hopped upon his head, and danced along it, avoiding his wounds. She hoped to warm his blood, reviving some mammalian instinct, encouraging him into the last light penetrating the bars before dusk. She asked him to look out across the meadow and imagine wandering across it, like he had once plodded the evening plains of South America, before being trapped, bagged, sold and shipped.
    “You have to get yourself better,” she chirped. “Better and better and better. You have to get yourself better.”
    She cocked her head as she told him this, and tickled her feathers.
    “But I can’t go on,” the anteater said slowly. “Anyway, they don’t even like me.”
    “You have to get yourself better. And you have to make them like you,” said Bessie, picking away at him. “It’s the only way to survive in this business. The only way to survive.”
    She jumped along his back, treading her tiny feet into his hair, trying to massage his exotic haystack of a torso.
    “It’s the only way to survive.”
    The anteater sighed. He stuck out his tongue, curling it right back on itself until it reached his eyes. He licked at