The Night Circus - Erin Morgenstern [105]
“What’s the Drawing Room?” Bailey asks, the curiosity about a tent he hasn’t heard of winning out over the fleeting thought to ask who Celia is, as he does not recall Poppet mentioning the name before.
“It’s a tent that’s made up of blank black walls with buckets full of chalk so you can draw everywhere. Some people only sign their names but others draw pictures. Sometimes Widge will write out little stories, but he draws things, too, he’s quite good at it.”
As they walk around the courtyard, Poppet insists he try a spiced cocoa that is both wonderfully warming and slightly painful. He finds his appetite has returned, so they share a bowl of dumplings and a packet of pieces of edible paper, with detailed illustrations on them that match their respective flavors.
They wander through a tent full of mist, encountering creatures made out of paper. Curling white snakes with flickering black tongues, birds with coal-colored wings flapping through the thick fog.
The dark shadow of an unidentifiable creature scurries across Poppet’s boots and out of sight.
She claims there is a fire-breathing paper dragon somewhere in the tent, and though Bailey believes her, he has difficulty reconciling in his head the idea of paper that breathes fire.
“It’s getting late,” Poppet remarks as they walk from tent to tent. “Do you have to go home?”
“I can stay for a while,” Bailey says. He has become something of an expert at sneaking back into his house without waking anyone, so he has been staying at the circus later and later each night.
There are fewer patrons wandering the circus at this hour, and as they walk Bailey notices that many of them are wearing red scarves. Different types, from heavy cabled wool to fine lace, but each is a deep, scarlet red that looks even redder against all of the black and white.
He asks Poppet about it, once so many flashes of red have passed by that he is sure it is not a coincidence, and recalling that the young woman with the rose had a red scarf as well.
“It’s like a uniform,” she says. “They’re rêveurs. Some of them follow the circus around. They always stay later than other people. The red is how they identify each other.”
Bailey tries to ask more questions about the rêveurs and their scarves, but before he can, Poppet pulls him into another tent and he is immediately silenced by the sight he is met with inside.
The sensation reminds him of the first snow of winter, for those first few hours when everything is blanketed in white, soft and quiet.
Everything in this tent is white. Nothing black, not even stripes visible on the walls. A shimmering, almost blinding white. There are trees and flowers and grass surrounding twisted pebble pathways, every leaf and petal perfectly white.
“What is this?” Bailey asks. He did not have a chance to read the sign outside the door.
“This is the Ice Garden,” Poppet says, pulling him down the path. It turns into an open space with a fountain in the middle, bubbling white foam over clear carved ice. Pale trees line the edges of the tent, showers of snowflakes falling from their branches.
There is no one else in the tent, nothing disrupting the surroundings. Bailey peers at a nearby rose, and while it is cold and frozen and white, there is the barest hint of scent as he leans closer. The scent of rose and ice and sugar. It reminds him of the spun-sugar flowers sold by vendors in the courtyard.
“Let’s play hide-and-seek,” Poppet suggests, and Bailey agrees before she unbuttons her coat and leaves it on a frozen bench, her white costume rendering her all but invisible.
“That’s not fair!” he calls as she disappears behind the hanging branches of a willow tree. He follows her around trees and topiaries, through coils of vines and roses, chasing glimpses of her red hair.
Bookkeeping
LONDON, MARCH 1900
Chandresh Christophe Lefèvre sits at the huge mahogany desk in his study, a mostly empty bottle of brandy in front