The Night Circus(30)

A tenth chime, a tenth arrow, and the bonfire turns deepest midnight blue.

On the penultimate chime, the dancing flames change from blue to black, and for that moment, it is difficult to discern the fire from its cauldron.

And on the final strike, the dark flames are replaced with a blinding white, a shower of sparks falling like snowflakes around it. Huge curls of dense white smoke swirl up into the night sky.

The reaction from the crowd is uproarious. The spectators who had been considering taking their leave decide to stay just a bit longer and comment enthusiastically about the lighting of the fire. Those who do not witness it themselves hardly believe the stories told minutes or hours later.

People roam from tent to tent, wandering down paths that loop over each other, never seeming to end. Some enter each tent they pass, while others are more selective, choosing tents to enter after careful consideration of signs. Some find a particular tent so fascinating that they are unable to exit it, opting instead to stay there the duration of their visit. Patrons make suggestions to other patrons they pass on the concourses, pointing out remarkable tents they have visited already. Their advice is always taken with pleasure, though often the advisees are distracted by other tents before they locate the recommended ones.

It is difficult to usher the remaining patrons out as the dawn creeps up, and they are only consoled by assurances that they may return when the sun sets again.

All told, opening night is an undeniable success.

There is only one minor mishap of sorts, one unexpected occurrence. It passes unnoticed by any of the patrons, and many of the performers are not aware of it until after the fact.

Just before sunset, while the last-minute preparations are being made (costumes adjusted, caramel melted), the wife of the wild-cat tamer unexpectedly goes into labor. She is, when not in a delicate state, her husband’s assistant. Their act has been subtly modified for her absence, but the cats themselves seem agitated.

She is expecting twins, though they are not due for a few more weeks. People joke afterward that perhaps they did not want to miss opening night.

A doctor is brought to the circus before it opens to the public and escorted discreetly backstage for the delivery (an easier feat to accomplish than moving her to a hospital).

Six minutes before midnight, Winston Aidan Murray is born.

Seven minutes after midnight, his sister, Penelope Aislin Murray, follows.

When the news is relayed to Chandresh Christophe Lefèvre, he is mildly disappointed that the twins are not identical. He had thought up various roles in the circus for identical twins to perform once the children were old enough. Fraternal twins, on the other hand, lack the amount of theatricality he had expected, but he has Marco arrange the delivery of two enormous bouquets of red roses anyway.

They are tiny things, each with a rather surprising amount of bright red hair. They barely cry, staying awake and alert, with matching pairs of wide blue eyes. They are wrapped in spare bits of silk and satin, white for her and black for him.

A steady stream of circus performers comes to see them in between acts, taking turns holding them and inevitably remarking on their exquisite timing. They will fit right in, everyone says, save for their hair. Someone suggests hats until they are old enough for hair dye. Someone else remarks that it would be a travesty to dye over such a color, a shocking red much brighter than their mother’s auburn.

“It is an auspicious color,” Tsukiko comments, but she refuses to elaborate on her meaning. She kisses each twin on the forehead and later makes strings of folded paper cranes to hang above their cradle.

Close to dawn, when the circus is emptying, they are taken for a walk around the tents and into the courtyard. The purpose is ostensibly to lull them to sleep, but they stay awake, watching the lights and the costumes and the stripes on the tents around them, strangely alert for being only a few hours old.

Not until the sun has risen do they finally close their eyes, side by side in the black wrought-iron cradle lined with striped blankets that already awaits them, despite their early arrival. It was delivered as a gift a few weeks earlier, though it had no card or note. The Murrays assumed it was a gift from Chandresh, though when they thanked him for it he claimed he had no idea what they were talking about.

The twins quite like it, regardless of its dubious origins.

No one recalls afterward exactly who it was that dubbed them Poppet and Widget. As with the cradle, no one takes credit for it.

But the nicknames stick, as nicknames do.





Opening Night II: Sparks

LONDON, OCTOBER 13 AND 14, 1886




Marco spends the first several hours of opening night taking surreptitious glances at his watch, waiting impatiently for the hands to reach midnight.

The unexpected early arrival of the Murray twins has complicated his schedule already, but if the lighting of the bonfire proceeds as planned, that should be enough.

It is the best solution he can come up with, knowing that in a few weeks the circus will be hundreds of miles away, leaving him alone in London.

And while Isobel may prove helpful, he needs a stronger tie.

Ever since he discovered the venue for the challenge, he has been slowly taking on more responsibility for the circus. Doing all that Chandresh asked of him and more, to the point where he was given free rein with everything from approving the design of the gates to ordering the canvas for the tents.

It worries him, the scope of the binding. He has never attempted anything on this scale, but there seems no good reason not to start off the game as strongly as possible.