The statue herself is still, but her hand is held out, and only then does Bailey notice the young woman with a red scarf standing in front of her, offering the love letter — clad statue a single crimson rose.
The movement is so subtle that it is almost undetectable, but slowly, very, very slowly, the statue reaches to accept the rose. Her fingers open, and the young woman with the rose waits patiently as the statue gradually closes her hand around the stem, releasing it only when it is secure.
And then the young woman bows to the statue, and walks off into the crowd.
The statue continues to hold the rose. The color seems more vibrant against the white and black of her gown.
Bailey is still watching the statue when Poppet taps him on the shoulder.
“She’s my favorite,” Poppet says, looking up at the statue with him.
“Who is she?” Bailey asks.
“She has a lot of names,” Poppet says, “but mostly they call her the Paramour. I’m glad someone gave her a flower tonight. I do it myself, sometimes, if she doesn’t have one. I don’t think she looks complete without it.”
The statue is lifting the rose, gradually, to her face. Her eyelids slowly close.
“What did you do with your time?” Poppet asks as they walk away from the Paramour toward the courtyard.
“I found a tent full of bottles and things that I wasn’t sure I was supposed to be in,” Bailey says. “It was … strange.”
To his surprise, Poppet laughs.
“That’s Widget’s tent,” she explains. “Celia made it for him, as a place to practice putting down his stories. He claims it’s easier than writing things out. Widge said he wanted to practice reading people, by the way, so we can catch up with him later. He does that sometimes, to pick up bits of stories. He’ll probably be in the Hall of Mirrors or the Drawing Room.”
“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.