“Disappointing?” Victor asks.
“Well, the weather is not ideal, as I’m certain you’ve noticed,” August says, gesturing up at the heavy grey clouds. “We had quite a storm last night. The circus was closed, of course, which was odd to begin with as in all my time I have never seen it set up only to be closed the first night for inclement weather. Regardless, there was some sort of, I don’t even know what to call it, a noise of some sort around midnight. A crashing sound that practically shook the house. I thought perhaps something had been struck by lightning. There was a great deal of smoke over the circus, and one of the neighbors swears he saw a flash of light bright as day. I took a walk down there this morning and nothing appears to be amiss, though the closure sign is still up on the gates.”
“How strange,” Lorena remarks.
Without a word Bailey leaps over the porch railing and takes off in a full run through the trees. He heads toward the striped tents as fast as he can, his red scarf trailing out behind him.
Old Ghosts
LONDON, OCTOBER 31, 1902
It is late and the pavement is dark despite the streetlamps dotting the line of grey stone buildings. Isobel stands near the shadowed stairs of the one she called home for almost a year, what now seems like a lifetime ago. She waits outside for Marco to return, a pale blue shawl pulled around her shoulders like a patch of day-bright sky in the night.
Hours pass before Marco appears at the corner. His grip on his briefcase tightens when he sees her.
“What are you doing here?” he asks. “You’re supposed to be in the States.”
“I left the circus,” Isobel said. “I walked away. Celia said I could.”
She takes a faded scrap of paper from her pocket, bearing her name, her real name that he coaxed from her years ago and asked her to write in one of his notebooks.
“Of course she did,” Marco says.
“May I come upstairs?” she asks, fidgeting with the edge of her shawl.
“No,” Marco says, glancing up at the windows. A dim, flickering light illuminates the glass. “Please, just say whatever it is you’re here to say.”
Isobel frowns. She looks around the street but it is dark and empty, only a crisp breeze blowing through, rustling the leaves in the gutter.
“I wanted to say that I was sorry,” she says quietly. “For not telling you that I was tempering. I know what happened last year was partly my fault.”
“You should apologize to Celia, not to me.”
“I already have,” Isobel says. “I knew she was in love with someone, but I thought it was Herr Thiessen. I didn’t realize until that night that it was you. But she loved him as well, and she lost him and I was the cause.”
“It was not your fault,” Marco says. “There were a great many factors involved.”
“There have always been a great many factors involved,” Isobel says. “I didn’t mean to get so tangled up in this. I only wanted to be helpful. I wanted to get through … this and go back to the way things were, before.”
“We cannot go backward,” Marco says. “A great deal is not how it used to be.”
“I know,” Isobel says. “I cannot hate her. I have tried. I cannot even dislike her. She let me carry on for years, clearly suspicious of her, but she was always kind to me. And I loved the circus. I felt like I finally had a home, a place I could belong. After a while I didn’t feel like I needed to protect you from her, I felt I should protect everyone else from both of you, and both of you from each other. I started after you came to see me in Paris, when you were so upset about the Wishing Tree, but I knew I had to continue after I read Celia’s cards.”
“When was this?” Marco asks.
“That night in Prague when you were supposed to meet me,” Isobel says. “You never let me read for you, not even a single card before last year. I had not realized that before. I wonder if I would have let this go on so long if I’d had the opportunity. It took ages for me to truly understand what her cards were saying. I could not see what was right in front of me. I wasted so much time. This was always about the two of you, even before you met. I was only a diversion.”
“You were not a diversion,” Marco says.
“Did you ever love me?” Isobel asks.
“No,” Marco admits. “I thought perhaps I could, but … ”
Isobel nods.
“I thought you did,” she says. “I was so certain that you did, even though you never said it. I couldn’t tell the difference between what was real and what I wanted to be real. I thought this was going to be temporary, even when it kept dragging on and on. But it’s not. It never was. I was the one who was temporary. I used to think that if she were gone, you would come back to me.”
“If she were gone, I would be nothing,” Marco says. “You should think better of yourself than to settle for that.”