We took our seats at the side aisle of the theater, toward the front, and no sooner had we sat down than the gaslights hissed into nothing and the theater went dark.
“What’s the show, anyway?” I whispered, leaning over so I could speak more quietly.
I felt Tam’s shrug. “Something from Nordsk, I think,” fe said. The curtains opened on a tall, pale woman with a crown in her white hair, wearing a low-cut blue dress. She spoke in Nordsk, a language that sounded mincing and spikily delicate to my ears, and of which I didn’t understand a word. Her voice held such urgency, though, that the feeling behind her words was clear. This woman was an excellent actress, that was obvious right away—but behind her, a panel of the background began to move, and words in the common language of Esting appeared on a scroll large enough for the people in the cheapest seats to read.
ARE YOU THERE, MY LOVE? the scroll read.
A man’s voice spoke in Nordsk just offstage, and the scroll moved to show, I’M HERE. ONLY COME A LITTLE CLOSER . . .
Already, I was wrapped up in the story on the stage and the clever set design that translated the Nordsk dialogue. How is it operated? I wondered.
YOU HAVE GIVEN UP SO MUCH FOR ME, the scroll read as the low voice spoke from offstage. YOUR DUTY, YOUR FAITH, YOUR CROWN—
I WOULD GIVE UP MORE FOR YOUR LOVE, the woman replied, AND FOR OUR CHILD, WHOM I BEAR EVEN NOW.
The woman pulled the crown from her head and tossed it aside. Its points were decorated with Brethren sunbursts; unlike Esting’s royal family, Nordsk’s still supported—and were rumored to be largely controlled by—the Brethren.
A flash of gaslight lit the stage with blinding brightness. I was dazzled for a moment, and when my eyes refocused, the woman was cradling a strange thing in her arms, a small writhing black monster. A puppet of some kind, an ugly creature, like a mammalian spider with too much fur and too many legs and teeth.
The woman screamed and tossed the puppet from her, and it flew across the stage. And when it hit the floor, it . . . scuttled. Not like a puppet, but a living creature.
I felt a moment of real horror, even though I knew well it must be only a trained dog in a costume. “A good trick,” I whispered to Tam, trying to pretend I was impressed instead of unsettled. But my voice was a little shaky, and fe looked at me with concern.
A black stain appeared on the woman’s blue dress, over her belly—a hidden pouch of ink or paint, I thought, still trying not to let it bother me—and she screamed again, clutching at her stomach and breasts, sinking to her knees.
I couldn’t say why, but I found myself starting to shake, unable to move from my chair or to stop watching.
I felt Tam’s hand cover mine. “Let’s go, Ivory,” fe said. “This isn’t what I was hoping to give you. I’m sorry.”
My face felt hot with embarrassment, but I let Tam lead me out of the theater and back into the light of the Port’s End afternoon.
Rosie
The princess shows
me a story. A tale,
like something out of time,
so long ago
it might be yet to come.
It is so near, she says,
but we can see it better
at a distance. So:
So once upon a—
well, you know—
there was a bear.
There was a girl.
There was a man.
He stole the girl’s story
and told it himself.
Dearly beloved.
The princess flinches.
The hairs on her arms
prick up, grow thick.
He has a story too, she says.
I know. I’m not trying to say—
The Lord be with you.
The Lord be with your light.
Your love. Your fear.
I’m not trying to say
that he doesn’t—
He learned early to call
love and fear
the two sides of one door.
You open
one, and the other
I’m not—
gapes wide.
There are too many
things he learned early.
Not how to fear.
Never that.
Nothing happened to him,
not to him, but he’d seen
enough to know
which side of the lintel
was safe.
He joined the priesthood young.
It is easy to love the Lord.
All-seeing. All-knowing. One.
Humanity is harder.
Messy. Dark. All doors
with doubled sides.
What did they use their will for
but to turn away from God?
He tried, though. Oh, he tried.
* * *
They sent him to a snow-capped
parish in the north, and he rose
through its ranks so quickly,
gave clear counsel. What was right
was always clear to him.
He tried to help
them turn from darkness,
truly he did. They just kept
turning back.
They never
feared enough.
He took to walking
through the icy woods.
He came to know the beasts.
Their eyes, all dark,
reflected only light.
Birds darted away. Wolves
slipped between the trees.
A heartbeat: love and fear.
This, he thought,
is what we should have been.
He could give them back to God
if only they could see
the world like beasts.
Somewhere under
his voice, the princess
screams, a beastly roar—
A shepherd’s flock
is never bred to think.
My story, my story.
Mine mine mine mine mine
We are gathered here today—
He took it from me,
my lover says
under the dream.
I can only claw
it back from him right here.
I need you
to tell me how it ends.
Ivory
The worst thing, every day, was listening to that Brethren preacher Brother Carey—the same priest I’d confronted on opening night. He’d returned with his soapbox and set up at the entrance to the park, telling any passersby who’d listen that the fire was a punishment from the Lord for the circus’s many sins.
No—worse than that was how many people listened.
And somehow it was me, Ivory—Ivory, who only ever wanted to be unnoticed and left alone—to whom everyone else looked for leadership. In the absence of Mama, it was me—not Vera or Toro or even Apple—who had inherited the circus and all the responsibilities that entailed.
Most of the time, I wanted to slough off the demands of it all, the way a snake sloughs off a skin that is too tight and itchy and dead, but I knew I couldn’t.
It wasn’t even that I loved the circus too much to let it die. It was that I loved the ones who loved it, Mama and Rosie, and who were unable to save it themselves.
Everyone kept asking me what we should do, which techniques to use for rebuilding, which suppliers to order from. I would have thought they’d talk to Toro, who kept the accounts, or to Apple. I would never in a million years have thought they’d look to me just because I was Mama’s daughter—and I thought Mama herself would balk at such special treatment.
I didn’t feel as if I could say any of that to the troupe, though, not even to Ciaran or Tam—things were so fragile, and the healing we were doing was so new. If people wanted to trust me, I couldn’t undermine that trust by telling them I doubted myself. I didn’t want to risk losing Tam’s good opinion—and even Ciaran’s sunny faith in me began to feel hollow and tiring.
But th
ere was one person I could talk to, I realized. I’d wanted to avoid him since the day we returned to Port’s End, but he was . . . there, all the time. And not part of the circus. And he loved me.
Or so he claimed.
I sat with both our fathers on the sixth day after the fire. I expected I’d have to wait most of the day before Mr. Valko, Rosie’s father, would leave Mama’s side.
But the redheaded man looked at me sitting across the hospital bed, and then he looked at Lord Bram, nodded, and stood up.
“I’ll be back soon, Angela,” he told Mama, stroking her wrist carefully, away from the burns. He squeezed my father’s shoulder, and my father reached up to grasp his hand. They shared a look full of some feeling I couldn’t decipher.
Mr. Valko smiled at me a little sadly. “She’s going to pull through, you know,” he said. “She always has before.”
“I know.” I wanted to sound strong, but I’d been holding back tears all day, and the words came out shaky.
He left.
I looked at my father. He looked back at me, and I saw the smile in his eyes before it came to his mouth.
He let go of Mama and reached out his large hands toward mine.
I tried to resist for a moment—then wondered why I was trying. Why, after all, had I come?
I placed my hands in my father’s.
They surrounded me, like warm earth around seeds. Like I was returning to some kind of source. I didn’t want to like the feeling, but I did.
The tears came then.
Of course.
He held my hands, steady and firm and gentle, while I cried. I hoped fervently that he wouldn’t try to embrace me, and he didn’t.
He looked at me, and his gaze was steady and gentle too. “What do you need, Ivory?” he asked. “What can I do for you?”
“I need her to wake up,” I said. “I don’t know how much longer I can manage all of this without her. I don’t know how much longer I should.”
“What has been hardest to manage?” he asked. “Has anyone been mistreating you, been disrespectful? Do you need me to speak to someone?”
“No,” I said, hiccupping, “that’s just the problem. They’ve been too respectful. Everyone’s assuming I know what to do, how to manage, just because I’m Mama’s daughter. They have no idea it’s just—” My voice caught. “I don’t mean this in a funny way, but it’s just . . . it’s just an act. I’m just pretending I know what to do.”
He regarded me kindly with his dark eyes that were an older version of mine, so different from the light brown eyes Rosie had gotten from Mama. But there was a kind of mourning in his gaze too.
“I suspect the reason they look to you to manage isn’t just that you’re Mama’s daughter. You think logically, make plans, find resources. Just like she always did, in fact. Did you think you’d inherited nothing of her? If it’s all an act, it’s a convincing one. I, for instance, believe entirely that you’re capable of carrying on Angela’s work.”
I pulled my hands out of his. “But I don’t believe it. That’s the point.” I could feel my longing for a father’s help curdling back into the anger I’d carried for so long about his absence.
He looked down at his empty hands, and for that moment, I despised him.
“I’ve never been able to do anything for you, Ivory,” he whispered. “I hate myself for it.”
I nodded. I kept my face blank and hard, but my sharp rage was already fading away. I wanted so much for him to be . . . I didn’t know what. For him to be something to me.
“I should have tried harder to be there for you. I should have fought Angela harder to get to come to your shows, to get to see you. I should have—” He swallowed. “I know I don’t deserve to tell you I believe in you. I know I have no right to any part of your life now. But we want to try—Tobias and I both do. We have longed for our daughters, and for Angela, the love of both our lives. In sharing our loneliness, our longing, we’ve come to love each other too. We hoped that maybe, now that we love each other enough to share our love for Angela, for you two, we might finally get to be together.” He looked down at Mama and swallowed, then looked back at me. “I know now that I have no right to you, that I never had a right to your mother. I know that loving someone doesn’t mean you own them. But I do believe it means you should try to help them. Please,” he said. “Please, let me help you. Tell me how to help you.”
Slowly, I told him what the circus needed to keep operating, how he could help me to organize food, clothes, supplies for rebuilding. I wouldn’t take more of his money; he’d paid for everyone’s care, and I couldn’t argue with him about that, but now the circus would mind its own. I’d talked to Toro; we had the funds, just about. It was managing all of it that had me nearly fainting with exhaustion before the morning was even out.
Most of all, I needed Brother Carey to stop his incessant preaching at the gate of Carter Park, in his voice that seemed to wash over us as if amplified by magic, telling everyone who passed by that the fire was a judgment from the Lord and we had deserved far worse than what we got.
It felt like a judgment on me for not double-checking the gas line. Having my guilt personified in the form of a self-righteous, self-proclaimed holy man was about to break me. I found myself on the edge of tears again just talking about him.
“It’s just that shame, on top of everything else,” I said, shaking with every word I spoke. “If I didn’t feel so ashamed, if there weren’t that voice floating through the air making sure I stayed ashamed, I think I could bear it.”
“Don’t worry, darling,” my father said. His endearment grated both ways on my heart—he hadn’t earned the right to call me darling, but I wanted to believe he was going to. “Wait here. We’ll sort out everything for you.”
I decided to believe him. Right then I needed to believe in someone besides myself.
He left my mother’s side, promising me that he and Rosie’s father would make sure the Brethren stopped harassing us.
But he never came back.
Rosie
I keep
waking up
alone.
Where is she?
Where is she?
I push myself back
into sleep,
a muzzy shroud
plush as a thousand
furs, a place at least
as dark and soft
as her.
A spotlight searches.
A place I can
pretend.
An empty stage.
In sleep I am
never
alone.
Is she here?
Burial in dream
is better; after all,
I’ve only really
touched her there.
Won’t meet
the light alone.
Better the dark
than that
bright loneliness
of waking
where things are only
what they seem to be.
Where is she?
Ivory
The next day, my father’s valet appeared at the gate to Carter Park. A tall, fat man in an impeccably tailored indigo coat with gold trim, he radiated the wealth and status that he represented on Lord Bram’s behalf. He gave Brother Carey and his soapbox a dignified sneer as he marched up to the circus grounds and asked me, in the most discreet and roundabout manner possible, if Lord Bram had spent the night there.
“He seems to be missing, miss,” he said, his formal tone barely hiding his genuine fear.
I despised myself for it a little, but I was relieved; there was a reason my father hadn’t given me the help he promised.
I despised myself more for my next thought—that even if he’d died, for a moment, I’d still had a good father.
* * *
The police arrived only a few hours after the valet left. The troupe was getting ready for dinner, but I hadn’t managed to work up an appetite to join them. I kept pacing, watchi
ng the gate as if it were the site of an open wound, where infection might seep in.
The first thing I noticed about them were the silver buttons on their gray uniforms glittering in the setting sun. They each gave a friendly nod to Carey as they passed him. I shouldn’t have been surprised that they approached me first, not when I was standing there staring at them like a sentry, but I still wasn’t used to being read as a leader.
“We’re here to look into the whereabouts of Lord Bram,” the shorter of the two officers said sternly. Even as she spoke, the other officer was sweeping past us onto the grounds. “Can you account for your activities last night?”
I flinched. “What do you mean?”
The officer looked me up and down. “You were one of the last to see him. We’re going to need to search these premises to see if there’s anything suspicious here.” She glanced behind me, one eyebrow raised, as if the very fact of who we were was already suspicious enough.
The headache that had been lurking at the back of my skull over the long workday crackled into real pain. I had to close my eyes for a moment, and when I opened them again, the officer was frowning at me. “Well?”
The Circus Rose Page 9