Lord Morgan's Cannon Read Free Page A

them, discovering his spectacles sat off their perch, dangling awkwardly. He realised how easily he could crush his glasses, if only he could summon the energy to roll over.
    “They don’t like me. And in all this time, they haven’t even given me a name.”

    For Bessie, this was a hard point to argue. She thought she knew the circus business better than any, being the star of every show. She often perched behind the Ring Master’s chair, and would listen to him and the humans discuss how to best entertain the masses. She knew what the audience wanted, what the Big Top needed, and how to put in a performance. She also knew that every star act had a name. And the anteater had no name.
    “Then we shall name you,” she declared. “We shall name you Bear.”
    Bessie seemed excited by her plan. None of the animals had bothered to name the anteater during the seasons past.
    But she didn’t consider how to get the anteater’s new name up in lights, or on all the posters. Perhaps she thought the anteater might take inspiration from a moniker, act appropriately, and the circus boys would notice. They would etch his habits upon a wooden sign, and hang it above his cage. Though quite how the young anteater might act like a bear went unresolved. Bessie also failed to think through how the audience might react on seeing a seven-year-old anteater, when they might be reasonably be expecting a seven-foot ursine. Perhaps that is why the anteater took the name Bear, but no human ever knew him as such.
    The anteater considered his new name, then decided he liked it. He was partial to honey after all. And if he was called Bear, the old leopard would finally have to listen to him, big beast to big beast.
    “I shall be called Bear,” he said.
    With that, he raised his whipped body, much like a bear might first stand after the sleepy season had ended.
    “He is Bear, he is Bear,” agreed Bessie.
    Doris flapped her ears at the sudden noise, swinging her shoulders to face the anteater’s cage. She blew a matriarch’s trumpet.
    “Will you perform in tonight’s show?” asked Doris, expectantly.
    “It’s the only way to survive. It’s the only way to survive,” agreed Bessie.
    The anteater straightened the spectacles upon his thinning head, using a single claw to draw the band around his ears. He looked a little like the crazy pilot of the steam-powered airship that had briefly drifted high over the show in Farnborough, doubling the takings.
    “Yes I suppose so,” he answered quietly. “But what if they whip me again?”
    “Oh I don’t think that’s likely,” said Doris. “Tonight is going to be a special performance. All the circus boys are talking about it,” she said.
    “Why so special?” asked Bessie.
    She started preening her most blue feathers, chattering her beak along their length, getting all excited.
    “Why?” roared Doris. “Why?”
    She pulled away from the anteater’s cage, and pirouetted as only a trained elephant can, spinning her whole body around a single back leg. She stepped out of her chain, settled and leaned into the bars, her two short tushes splitting them.
    “Tonight is special, because the great Lord Morgan is coming to see us all,” she announced proudly.
    “Lord Morgan is coming! Lord Morgan is coming!” squealed Bessie.
    She flew out of the cage, and round and round in the darkening sky, oblivious to any watching merlins hidden in the trees at the meadow’s edge.
    The antics of the elephant and the bird started to draw a crowd. A murmuration of starlings flew past, convulsing itself, unsure whether to stay or go. Edward the pin monkey danced across the field, up Doris’s tail and on to her back. Even a common hedgehog dozing under the wagon awoke and unfurled himself to listen.
    Together the performing animals of Whyte and Wingate’s Big Top circus began to piece together all they knew.
    Lord Morgan was a most noble man, the foremost animal expert in all the world, said Edward.