BY LUNCHTIME THE first matinee show of the circus had begun, and reams of people from all across London's many boroughs peeled themselves away from their chores and employment, and entered Dr Marvello's Travelling Circus. Hyde Park was alight with such uncommon electricity as seemingly everyone from miles around had put their lives on hold and come to the circus.
Flurries of children and adults alike moved from one tent to the next, marvelling at the spectacles they witnessed as the show in the Big Top started. Destine patrolled around inside the massive tent watching the faces of the audience as the spectacle unfolded. Ruby had the crowd's stomachs in their mouths with her knife-throwing skills. The clowns Jeremiah and Peregrine soaked the first three rows with buckets of cold water. The Chinese twins Yin and Yang scared everyone half to death with their gymnastic exploits, and Prometheus bent steel bars as if they were made of liquorice-with Butter scurrying around doing everything in between. A well-oiled machine, the circus was a self-propagating beast. Everyone knew their part and each played it exceptionally. Shocks and frights were tempered with thrills and laughter like any good circus, and the atmosphere both inside and outside the Big Top was next to paradise. Cheers, screams of excitement and laughter undulated everywhere.
Destine stood back from the crowds and smiled to herself. Something she had not done in a long while. The circus had an amazing power to invigorate and rejuvenate. Suddenly, all her recent troubles were pushed to the back of her mind, as the performer side of her brain kicked in, and Destine simply allowed herself to go with the flow. She was taking a welcome break from her role as circus fortune-teller and she was feeling agitated, without knowing why. Despite how much pleasure she gained from watching the embryo of the circus blossom into its present state of completion, something was niggling at her. Tiny warm butterflies floated around Destine's body, and her hands tingled. Although this was normality once more (and how she had missed its presence), there was still something missing.
Cornelius Quaint was nowhere to be seen.
The show's resident conjuror had made a decidedly swift exit from the stage after astounding the crowds with his illusions, and that was most unlike him. Destine left the canvas-covered cornucopia of delights and walked out into Hyde Park.
It was a surprisingly clear and dry day after the previous night's torrential rain, and she held her gloved hand to her brow, shielding her eyes from the low-lying sunshine that bathed the entire park in golden hues and amber washes. The leafless, skeletal trees held little shade, and the long shadows of their barren trunks created a crazy-paving effect across the lawns of the park. The French fortune-teller felt the warmth of the sun on her cheeks, and a smile crossed over her lips. She was safe now, thanks to Cornelius. She caressed her hands slowly. They had not looked so vibrant in years, her temperamental arthritis now seemingly evaporated into thin air. She wasn't certain why that was, but the more she tried to make sense of it, the more it seemed to slip from her grasp. She needed to find Cornelius; he would know the answers. He'd have to, because surely what Destine thought was occurring could not possibly be true.
Though Madame Destine felt younger than she had done in well over fifty years, there was one nagging concern resting at the forefront of her worries. Since she had regained consciousness she had not experienced even the vaguest hint of any sort of premonition. It was as if everything that had made her special had been suddenly switched off. This knowledge served only to prove to her what had happened-for what use does an immortal have for seeing the future? Believing in eternal life was like believing in fairy tales, and despite the fact that Destine was gifted with an amazing quota of all kinds of otherworldly gifts-there was something so ethereal about immortality that she could scarcely allow her imagination to entertain the thought.
She had shared her thoughts with her best friend Ruby after she recovered from the antidote's quelling of the deadly poison, receiving more than one quasi-sarcastic remark for her trouble. One of the first questions that the young knife-smith asked was: 'How do you know you can live for ever?', and, in truth, she had no answer. It was just something she knew to be true, as much as she knew she hated spinach, she knew she liked lavender perfume and she knew she preferred the colour green to the colour blue.
She knew that something inside her had changed irrevocably. Something great and something miraculous…and yet every time she tried to put it into words, she was lost. She needed Cornelius to help her discover why that was, to make sense of it all, and there was another tingle of a wish inside her mind also. If she felt the way she did-if she had these suspicions as to her fate-how did he feel? Was he sharing her delight at this sudden sense of rebirth?
Something caught Destine's eye up on Stanhope Hill, and she knew it was him instantly, his dark cloak buffeted by the wind like a flag on a pole. He was standing alone, staring down at the festivities of the circus, detracted from it like an outsider. For a man surrounded by the comfort and warmth of his friends and adopted family, Cornelius Quaint felt like the loneliest man on earth…