The Night Circus(8)

The boy watches both the magician and his modest audience curiously. The spectators seem impressed by the deceptions, often applauding them politely.

When he questions his instructor after the show, he is told the matter will not be discussed until they return to London at the end of the week.

The next evening, the boy is brought to a larger theater and again left alone for the performance. The sheer size of the crowd makes him nervous, he has never been in a space so full of people before.

The man on this stage appears older than the magician from the previous night. He wears a nicer suit. His movements are more precise. Every exhibition is not only unusual but captivating.

The applause is more than polite.

And this magician does not hide handkerchiefs within his lace shirt cuffs. The birds that appear from all manner of locations have no cages at all. These are feats that the boy has seen only in his lessons. Manipulations and illusions he has been expressly informed again and again must be kept secret.

The boy applauds as well when Prospero the Enchanter takes his final bow.

Again, his instructor refuses to answer any of his questions until they return to London.

Once in the town house, falling back into a routine that now feels as though it had never been disrupted, the man in the grey suit first asks the boy to tell him the difference between the two performances.

“The first man was using mechanical contraptions and mirrors, making the audience look different places when he did not wish them to see something, to create a false impression. The second man, the one named for the duke from The Tempest, he was pretending to do similar things, but he did not use mirrors or tricks. He did things the way you do.”

“Very good.”

“Do you know that man?” the boy asks.

“I have known that man for a very long time,” his instructor says.

“Does he teach those things as well, the way you teach me?”

His instructor nods, but does not elaborate.

“How can the people watching not see the difference?” the boy asks. To him it is clear, though he cannot properly articulate why. It was something he felt in the air as much as observed with his eyes.

“People see what they wish to see. And in most cases, what they are told that they see.”

They do not discuss the matter further.

While there are other not-quite holidays, though they are rare, the boy is not taken to see any other magicians.





*


PROSPERO THE ENCHANTER uses a pocket knife to slit his daughter’s fingertips open, one by one, watching wordlessly as she cries until calm enough to heal them, drips of blood slowly creeping backward.

The skin melds together, swirls of fingerprint ridges finding one another again, closing solidly once more.

Celia’s shoulders fall, releasing the tension that has knotted in them, her relief palpable as she draws herself safely together.

Her father gives her only moments to rest before slicing each of her newly healed fingers again.





*


THE MAN IN THE GREY SUIT takes a handkerchief from his pocket and drops it on the table, where it lands with a muffled thump, something heavier than silk hidden in the folds. He pulls the square of silk upward, letting the contents, a solitary gold ring, roll out onto the table. It is slightly tarnished and engraved with something that the boy thinks might be words in Latin, but the script is looping and flourished and he cannot make them out.

The man in the grey suit replaces the now empty handkerchief in his pocket.

“Today we are going to learn about binding,” he says.

When they reach the point of the lesson that includes the practical demonstration, he instructs the boy to place the ring on his own hand. He never touches the boy, regardless of the circumstances.

The boy tries in vain to pry the ring from his finger as it dissolves into his skin.

“Bindings are permanent, my boy,” the man in the grey suit says.

“What am I bound to?” the boy asks, frowning at the scar where the ring had been moments before.

“An obligation you already had, and a person you will not meet for some time. The details are not important at this point. This is merely a necessary technicality.”

The boy only nods and does not question further, but that night, when he is alone again and unable to sleep, he spends hours staring at his hand in the moonlight, wondering who the person he is bound to might be.





*


THOUSANDS OF MILES AWAY, in a crowded theater that thunders with applause for the man onstage, hidden in the shadows formed between disused pieces of scenery backstage, Celia Bowen curls herself into a ball and cries.





Le Bateleur

LONDON, MAY — JUNE 1884




Just before the boy turns nineteen, the man in the grey suit removes him from the town house without notice, setting him up in a modestly sized flat with a view of the British Museum.

At first he assumes that it is only a temporary matter. There have been, of late, journeys of weeks or even months, to France and Germany and Greece, filled with more studying than sightseeing. But this is not one of those not-quite holidays spent in luxurious hotels.

It is a modest flat with basic furnishings, so similar to his former rooms that he finds it difficult to feel anything resembling homesickness, save for the library, though he still possesses an impressive number of books.