The Book of Speculation Read Online Free Page A

him, the crinkles around his eyes. The boy scurried close to the desk where the man sat, listening to his rumbling.
    “We haven’t done India before. India,” Peabody said to himself. “Yes, an Indian savage, I think.” He chuckled. “My new Wild Boy.” He reached down as if to pat the boy’s head, but paused. “Would you like to be a savage?” The boy did not respond. Peabody’s brows lifted. “Can’t you speak?”
    The boy pressed his back to the wall. His skin felt itchy and tight. He stared at the intricate ties on the man’s shoes and stretched his toes against the floor.
    “No matter, lad. Yours will not be a speaking role.” The corner of his mouth twisted. “More a disappearing act.”
    The boy reached to touch the man’s shoes.
    “Like those, do you?”
    The boy pulled away.
    Peabody frowned, an expression discernible by the turn of his moustache. His sharp eyes softened and he spoke quietly. “You’ve not been treated well. We’ll fix that, boy. You’ll stay the night, see if it settles you.”
    The boy was given a blanket from a trunk. It was scratchy, but he enjoyed rubbing it across his temple. He huddled against the man’s desk, pulling the blanket around him. Once during the night the man left and the boy feared he’d been abandoned, but a short time later the man returned with bread. The boy tore into it. The man said nothing, but began scribbling in a book. Occasionally his hand would drift down to pull the blanket back over the boy’s shoulder.
    As sleep overtook him, the boy decided he would follow this man anywhere.
    In the morning Peabody walked the boy through the circled wagons, keeping several paces ahead, and then waiting for him to follow. When they came to an imposing cage affixed to a dray wagon, Peabody stopped.
    “I’ve thought on it. This will be yours; you’re to be our Wild Boy.”
    The boy examined the cage, unaware of the other eyes that looked from their wagons, watching him. The floor was scattered with straw and wood shavings that kept it warm in the evenings—a good consideration, as the boy would be barefooted and naked. On the outside of the cage hung lavish velvet curtains that Peabody had liberated from his mother’s drawing room. The curtains were weighted by chains—to close out the light, Peabody said—and rigged with pulleys. Peabody demonstrated how to surprise an audience by snapping them open the moment a Wild Boy defecated or committed an equally abhorrent act.
    “It was the previous Wild Boy’s, but we’ll make it yours.”

    The boy took to the act. He enjoyed the cool metal against his skin, and the act allowed him to observe as much as he was observed. Faces gawked at him, and he stared back without fear. He tried to understand the rolls women wore their hair in, why their hips appeared larger than men’s, and the strange ways that men groomed the hair on their faces. He jumped, crawled, scrambled, ate, and voided where and how he pleased. If he did not like a man, he could sneer and spit without repercussion, and would be rewarded for the privilege. He experienced the beginnings of ease.
    Without the boy’s knowledge, Peabody studied and tailored the act, learning the intricacies of the boy’s disappearing, perhaps better than the boy himself understood. If he left the child in the cage for the length of a morning, the boy would crouch low to the floor, his breaths would become shallow until his chest barely moved, and then, quite suddenly, he would vanish. Peabody learned to slowly raise the curtain on the disappeared boy.
    “Hush, fine people,” he instructed, sotto voce. “No good can come from frightening a savage beast.”
    Lifting the curtain was enough to rouse the boy from dissipation. As spectators drew in close to what they presumed was an empty cage, the boy revealed himself. The abrupt appearance of a savage where there had been none made children shout; beyond that, the boy needed do little more than remain mute and