Erin Morgenstern - The Night Circus

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.

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.

The bonfire will provide him with a connection to the circus, even though he is not entirely certain how well it will work. And with so many people involved, it seems sensible to add an element of safety to the venue.

It has taken months of preparation.

Chandresh was more than willing to let him organize the lighting, having already deemed him invaluable to the circus planning with only mild coercion. A wave of a hand, and the details were all up to him.

And most important, Chandresh agreed to let it be a secret. The lighting itself took on the air of a Midnight Dinner, with no questions permitted as to the ingredients or menu.

No answers provided as to what the arrows are tipped with to create such an astounding effect. How the flames are made to shift from one vibrant hue to another.

Those who did inquire, during preparations and rehearsals, were told that to reveal the methods would ruin the effect.

Though, of course, Marco has been unable to rehearse the most important part.

It is easy enough for him to slip away from Chandresh in the crowded courtyard just before midnight.

He makes his way toward the twisted iron, moving as close as he can to the empty cauldron. He takes a large, leather-bound notebook from his coat, a perfect copy of one that has been safely locked in his office. No one in the milling crowd notices as he tosses it into the bottom of the cauldron. It lands with a thud that is muffled by the ambient noise.

The cover flips open, exposing the elaborate ink tree to the star-speckled night sky.

He stays close to the edge of the twisted metal while the archers take their places.

His attention remains focused on the flames despite the press of patrons around him as the fire is amplified through a rainbow of hues.

When the last arrow lands, he closes his eyes. The white flames burn red through his eyelids.

CELIA EXPECTED TO FEEL like a poor imitation of her father during her first performances, but to her relief the experience is vastly different from the one she watched so many times in theater after theater.

The space is small and intimate. The audiences are modest enough that they remain individual people rather than blending into an anonymous crowd.

She finds she is able to make each performance unique, letting the response of the audience inform what she chooses to do next.

While she enjoys it more than she thought she would, she is grateful that she has stretches of time to herself in between. As it nears midnight, she decides to see if she can find a place to discreetly watch the lighting of the bonfire.

But as she makes her way through the area that is already being referred to as backstage despite the lack of stage, she is quickly swept up in the somewhat ordered chaos surrounding the impending birth of the Murray twins.

Several of the performers and staff have gathered, waiting anxiously. The doctor who has been brought in seems to find the entire situation strange. The contortionist comes and goes. Aidan Murray paces like one of his cats.

Celia endeavors to be as helpful as she can, which consists mainly of fetching cups of tea and finding new and creative ways to assure people that everything will be fine.

It reminds her so much of consoling her old spiritualist clients that she is surprised when she is thanked by name.

The soft cry that sounds minutes before midnight comes as a relief, met by sighs and cheers.

And then something else immediately follows.

Celia feels it before she hears the applause echoing from the courtyard, the shift that suddenly spreads through the circus like a wave.

It courses through her body, sending an involuntary shiver down her spine, almost knocking her off of her feet.