The Night Circus (26 page)

And at the same time something looks strikingly wrong to everyone who lays eyes on the surviving sister. Something they can’t quite put their finger on. Something out of balance.

An occasional tear rolls down Lainie Burgess’s cheek but she greets each mourner with a smile and thanks them for attending. She makes jokes that Tara might have quipped were she not inside the polished-wood coffin. There are no other family members present, though some less familiar acquaintances assume that the white-haired woman and bespectacled man who seldom leave Lainie’s side are her mother and husband, respectively. While they are incorrect, neither Mme. Padva nor Mr. Barris mind the mistake.

There are countless roses. Red roses, white roses, pink roses. There is even a single black rose amongst the blossoms, though no one knows its origin. Chandresh takes credit only for the white blooms, keeping one pinned to his lapel that he toys with distractedly throughout the service.

When Lainie speaks about her sister her words are met with sighs and laughter and sad smiles.

“I do not mourn the loss of my sister because she will always be with me, in my heart,” she says. “I am, however, rather annoyed that my Tara has left me to suffer you lot alone. I do not see as well without her. I do not hear as well without her. I do not feel as well without her. I would be better off without a hand or a leg than without my sister. Then at least she would be here to mock my appearance and claim to be the pretty one for a change. We have all lost our Tara, but I have lost a part of myself as well.”

In the cemetery there is a single performer that even some of the mourners who are not part of Le Cirque des Rêves recognize, though the woman bedecked from head to toe in snowiest white has added a pair of feathered wings to her costume. They cascade down her back and flutter gently in the breeze while she remains still as stone. Many of the attendants seem surprised by her presence but they take their cues from Lainie, who is delighted at the sight of the living angel standing over her sister’s grave.

It was the Burgess sisters, after all, who originated the tradition of such statues within the circus. Performers standing stock-still with elaborate costumes and painted skin on platforms set up in precarious spaces between tents. If watched for hours, they sometimes change position entirely, but the motion will be agonizingly slow, to the point that many observers insist that they are cleverly crafted automatons and not proper people.

The circus contains several of these performers. The star-speckled Empress of the Night. The coal-dark Black Pirate. The one that now watches over Tara Burgess is most often referred to as the Snow Queen.

There is the softest of sobbing as the coffin is lowered into the ground, but it is difficult to pinpoint who it is coming from, or if it is instead a collective sound of mingled sighs and wind and shifting feet.

The rain increases and umbrellas sprout like mushrooms amongst the graves. The damp dirt turns quickly to mud and the remainder of the burial is hastened to accommodate the weather.

The ceremony fades out rather than ending properly, the mourners shifting from neat rows to mingling crowd without a distinct moment to mark the change. Many linger to pass additional condolences on to Lainie, though some move off to seek shelter from the rain before the last of the dirt has settled.

Isobel and Tsukiko stand side by side some distance from Tara’s grave, sharing a large black umbrella that Isobel holds over their heads in one black-gloved hand. Tsukiko insists she does not mind the rain but Isobel shelters her anyway, grateful for the company.

“How did she die?” Tsukiko asks. It is a question that others have asked in hushed whispers throughout the afternoon and has been met with various answers, few of them satisfying. Those who know the details are not forthcoming.

“I was told it was an accident,” Isobel says quietly. “She was hit by a train.”

Tsukiko nods thoughtfully, pulling a silver cigarette holder and matching lighter from the pocket of her coat.

“How did she really die?” she asks.

“What do you mean?” Isobel says, looking around to see if anyone is close enough to overhear their conversation, but most of the mourners have dissipated into the rain. Only a handful remain, including Celia Bowen with Poppet Murray clinging to her gown, the girl wearing a frown that seems more angry than sad.

Lainie and Mr. Barris stand next to Tara’s grave, the angel hovering over them close enough to lay its hands upon their heads.

“You have seen things that defy belief, have you not?” Tsukiko asks.

Isobel nods.

“Do you think perhaps those things would be more difficult to reconcile if you were not part of them yourself? Perhaps to the point of driving one mad? The mind is a sensitive thing.”

“I don’t think she stepped in front of the train on purpose,” Isobel says, trying to keep her voice as low as possible.

“Perhaps not,” Tsukiko says. “I contend it is a possibility, at the very least.” She lights her cigarette, the flame catching easily despite the dampness of the air.

“It could have been an accident,” Isobel says.

“Have you had any accidents recently? Any broken bones, burns, any injury at all?” Tsukiko asks.

“No,” Isobel says.

“Have you taken ill? Even the slightest of sniffles?”

“No.” Isobel racks her brain for the last time she felt under the weather and she can only come up with a head cold she had a decade ago, the winter before she met Marco.

“I do not believe any of us have since the circus started,” Tsukiko says. “And no one has died until now. No one has been born, either, not since the Murray twins. Though it is not for lack of trying, given the way some of the acrobats carry on.”

“I  … ” Isobel starts but cannot finish. It is too much for her to wrap her mind around, and she is not sure she wants to be able to understand it.

“We are fish in a bowl, dear,” Tsukiko tells her, cigarette holder dangling precariously from her lips. “Very carefully monitored fish. Watched from all angles. If one of us floats to the top, it was not accidental. And if it was an accident, I worry that the watchers are not as careful as they should be.”

Isobel stays silent. She wishes Marco had accompanied Chandresh, though she doubts he would answer any of her questions, if he consented to speaking to her at all. Every reading she has done privately on the matter has been complicated, but there is always the presence of strong emotion on his part. She knows he cares about the circus, she has never had any reason to doubt that.

“Have you ever read your cards for someone who could not understand what they were dealing with, even though to you it was clear from only a short conversation and pictures on paper?” Tsukiko asks.

“Yes,” Isobel says. She has seen them hundreds of times, the querents who could not see things for what they were. Blind to betrayals and heartbreak, and always stubborn, no matter how gently she tried to explain.

“It is difficult to see a situation for what it is when you are in the midst of it,” Tsukiko says. “It is too familiar. Too comfortable.”

Tsukiko pauses. The curls of smoke from her cigarette slide between the raindrops as they wind around her head and up into the damp air.

“Perhaps the late Miss Burgess was close enough to the edge that she could see it differently,” she says.

Isobel frowns, looking back toward Tara’s grave. Lainie and Mr. Barris have turned and are walking away slowly, his arm around her shoulders.

“Have you ever been in love, Kiko?” Isobel asks.

Tsukiko’s shoulders stiffen as she exhales slowly. For a moment Isobel thinks her question will go unanswered, but then she replies.

“I have had affairs that lasted decades and others that lasted hours. I have loved princesses and peasants. And I suppose they loved me, each in their way.”

This is a typical Tsukiko response, one that does not truly answer the question. Isobel does not pry.

“It will come apart,” Tsukiko says after a long while. Isobel does not need to ask what she means. “The cracks are beginning to show. Sooner or later it is bound to break.” She pauses to take a final drag off her cigarette. “Are you still tempering?”

“Yes,” Isobel says. “But I don’t think it’s helping.”

“It is difficult to discern the effect of such things, you know. Your perspective is from the inside, after all. The smallest charms can be the most effective.”

“It doesn’t seem to be very effective.”

“Perhaps it is controlling the chaos within more than the chaos without.”

Isobel does not reply. Tsukiko shrugs and says no more.

After a moment they turn to leave together without discussion.

The snow-white angel alone remains, hovering over Tara Burgess’s fresh grave, holding a single black rose in one hand. She does not move, does not even bat an eyelash. Her powdered face stays frozen in sorrow.

The increasing rain pulls stray feathers from her wings and pins them to the mud below.

You walk down a hallway papered in playing cards, row upon row of clubs and spades. Lanterns fashioned from additional cards hang above, swinging gently as you pass by.

A door at the end of the hall leads to a spiraling iron staircase.

The stairs go both up and down. You go up, finding a trapdoor in the ceiling.

The room it opens into is full of feathers that flutter downward. When you walk through them, they fall like snow over the door in the floor, obscuring it from sight.

There are six identical doors. You choose one at random, trailing a few feathers with you.

The scent of pine is overwhelming as you enter the next room to find yourself in a forest full of evergreen trees. Only these trees are not green but bright and white, luminous in the darkness surrounding them.

They are difficult to navigate. As soon as you begin walking the walls are lost in shadows and branches.

There is a sound like a woman laughing nearby, or perhaps it is only the rustling of the trees as you push your way forward, searching for the next door, the next room.

You feel the warmth of breath on your neck, but when you turn there is no one there.

Ailuromancy
CONCORD, MASSACHUSETTS, OCTOBER 1902

L
eaving the fortune-teller’s tent and heading right, as she had suggested, Bailey almost immediately encounters a small crowd watching a performance. He cannot tell what it is at first, there is no raised platform involved. Peering through the space between spectators, he can see a hoop, larger than the one the contortionist used, held in the air. As he moves closer, he glimpses a black kitten leaping through it, landing somewhere out of sight.

A woman in front of him with a large hat turns and then he can see a young man about his own age, but a bit shorter, dressed in a black suit made of all manner of fabrics, and a matching black hat. On his shoulders sits a pair of stark-white kittens. As he lifts his black-gloved hand, palm open, one of the kittens jumps into it and bounces off his palm, leaping through the hoop, executing a rather impressive somersault at the pinnacle of its leap. Several members of the small audience laugh, and a few, including Bailey, applaud. The woman in the large hat steps aside completely, clearing Bailey’s line of sight. His hands freeze in mid-clap when he sees the young lady who has just caught the white kitten and is now lifting it to her shoulder where it sits along with the black kitten.

She is older, as he expected, and her red hair is somehow concealed within a white cap. But her costume is similar to the one she had been wearing when he last saw her: a patchwork dress of every fabric imaginable, each in tones of snowy white, a white jacket with lots of buttons, and a pair of bright-white gloves.

She turns her head, Bailey catches her eye, and she smiles at him. Not in the way that one smiles at a random member of the audience when one is in the middle of performing circus tricks with unusually talented kittens but in the way that one smiles when one recognizes someone they have not seen in some time. Bailey can tell the difference, and the fact that she remembers who he is makes him inexplicably and utterly pleased. He feels his ears getting rather hot despite the cold of the night air.

He watches the rest of the act with rapt attention, paying a fair deal more attention to the girl than the kittens, though the kittens are too impressive to ignore, and they steal his attention back periodically. When the act is finished, the girl and boy (and kittens) take a short bow, and the crowd claps and hoots.

Bailey is wondering what he should say, if he should say anything, as the crowd begins to disperse. A man pushes in front of him, another woman blocks his way to the side, and he loses sight of the girl completely. He pushes through the throng of people, and when he is free of them, the girl and the boy and the kittens are nowhere to be seen.

The crowd around him quickly dwindles to only a few people wandering up and down the pathway. There are no other directions to go, as far as he can tell. Only tall striped walls of tents line the area, and he turns around slowly, looking for any possible place they might have disappeared to, some corner or door. He is kicking himself for coming so close only to fail, when there is a tap on his shoulder.