With the second chime, the clock began shuddering. Marietta took a step back. ‘I do not think that a wise idea.’ She wondered if he had lost his mind. Drosselmeier slid a hand into his jacket pocket and retrieved a small object. He held it up. It was a key.
On the third chime, the centre panel of the grandfather clock opened.
Marietta’s fear took wing. Her heart fluttering in her chest, she ran down the centre of the ballroom to the double doors. They were locked. She screamed through the gap where they joined; the doors were paper-thin and there were a number of staff in proximity at all times. Surely at least one of the footmen would hear.
The fourth chime sounded.
Drosselmeier’s laugh was as unfeeling as a killing frost. He jumped down from the stage and walked towards her, amusement stalking the lines round his eyes. ‘Do give me a little credit. As you have already learnt, I have far more cunning than your average suitor. I shall not be as easily persuaded to turn my attentions elsewhere. Not now this has become so very interesting. The more frightened you become, the greater my appetite grows. I shall make you mine, meine kleine Tänzerin.’
Marietta’s gaze fell to the opacity between the doors. She peered through the keyhole and into blackness. When she pounded her hands on the doors, it sounded muffled.
The fifth chime.
She ran back to the stage in an attempt to distance herself from Drosselmeier’s advances. He continued his slow walk after her. Marietta’s fear burrowed under her skin, quickening her breath. At once she knew what it was to be prey, the rabbit’s terror of the fox, the fundamental knowledge of what it feels to be crushed within those jaws evident in its frantic eyes. So too did she see the women that had fled this path before her, an unending current from the belittled, trapped and underestimated to the broken and tormented. She backed away from him until she was pressed against the grandfather clock. A whirl of cold air seemed to emanate from it. ‘I beg of you, release me,’ she whispered as Drosselmeier set foot on the stage.
The sixth chime.
Drosselmeier’s answering smile permitted her a glimpse beneath his mask. She could not comprehend what she saw there yet it sent her out of her mind with fear. Panic dribbled down her logic.
‘I will make you regret denying me.,’ he whispered. ‘After a little time to think on how foolish your refusal is, you shall beg me to reconsider.’
Marietta climbed into the grandfather clock. She clicked the panel shut behind her and held onto it with her fingernails. Her breaths came hard and fast against the wood as she closed her eyes, waiting for Drosselmeier to rip the panel open. She felt the seventh, then the eighth chimes resonate through the clock and yet still she waited. She had heard tales of the things some men liked to inflict upon unwilling women and she could think of no other reason why Drosselmeier would have locked her inside the ballroom with him.
The ninth chime. The air was colder inside the clock, icing her arm. On the tenth chime, Marietta discovered a tiny crack in the wood. She peered out, holding her breath. Drosselmeier had vanished. Bracing herself for his sudden reappearance, she tested the panel with a gentle touch. It failed to open from the inside. She had trapped herself inside a virtual coffin.
Recalling Drosselmeier’s carriage clock she suffered a panicked notion that perhaps the clock only opened on the stroke of midnight and she would be left imprisoned within it until Christmas was over. Without a sound, she reached back, feeling for the back of the clock. Once she was certain Drosselmeier had exited the room, she was sure she could find a weaker point in the construction to force her way out. She stretched her arm back, further and further, yet there was no back to the clock. The eleventh chime rang out.
She stepped away from the panel to investigate, mindful that Drosselmeier might at this very moment be walking towards her in the darkness, aware of a second entrance to the clock. She went deeper. The air froze around her.
The twelfth and final chime struck.
Her teeth chattered and her fear bit deeper; the cold must be another of Drosselmeier’s tricks. With each step, she lowered her pointe shows softly onto the wood, determined not to call attention to her location. Until her shoe crunched down on something and she stilled. The darkness had shifted from the opacity of confinement and loss of hope to a dark jewel that glimmered with the promise of distant starlight. Her eyes adjusted to the darkness, revealing a white glow.
She was standing in snow.
And surrounding her, as far as the eye could see, were white-topped fir trees.
Act One
Scene Two
If Marie no longer dared to mention her adventures, she was still besieged by memories of the Kingdom of Sweets; and when she reflected on them, she could see everything clearly, as if she were once again in the Christmas Forest, or on the River of Attar of Roses, or in the City of Candied Fruits. And so, instead of playing as she used to with her playthings, she would sit very quiet and still, lost in thought, and everybody called her ‘the little dreamer’.
—ALEXANDRE DUMAS, THE STORY OF A NUTCRACKER
Chapter Fourteen
The snow was crisp and firm, forging a path of granulated sugar. Marietta wandered deeper into the enchantment. It was heavy with the scent of forest, snow and marzipan. Emerald fir trees towered up, brushing against the midnight patchwork of constellations. When she had last considered the night sky in Nottingham, Orion had been hunting through it, Perseus triumphed over his defeat of Medusa and the charioteer Auriga blazed by. A canvas of Greek mythology, the stories familiar old friends. Here, the stars were a language she did not speak. Pivoting in place, her breaths grew ragged, her thoughts tangled with wonder. ‘How can this be?’ she whispered aloud, uncertain and deeply suspicious of Drosselmeier’s involvement with it. Drosselmeier. The mere thought of his name lanced her with panic. She could not return to that locked ballroom. Far better to hide for a short while until the danger had passed. Even as the cold settled onto her skin and her breath turned to frozen wisps.
A sweet melody, reminiscent of Chopin’s most beloved nocturne, trickled out from behind the wall of firs to her east. Entranced by its rising and falling notes, Marietta followed the path of the music to a glistening, icy bend of river, lit by glowing globes of ice. Children and adults alike skated along, clad in fur-lined capes and velvet trousers, conversation and laughter spilling from them. Marietta studied the scene. She had been considering whether she’d delved into an elaborate invention of Drosselmeier’s, yet here were people. This could not be his creation. He must have led her to some strange point of entry, trapping her elsewhere until she acquiesced to his demands. Fear prickled down her spine as the curtains were whisked away and Marietta realised what she had been denying for weeks: Drosselmeier possessed strange and powerful gifts. Perhaps it was the confrontation with the physical proof of another world or perhaps it was that Marietta had recovered a long-forgotten sense here, but being in this place reinstated her old, childhood belief in magic.
And Drosselmeier had been wielding enchantments from her first glimpse of his entry to Nottingham; she had just lacked the belief to recognise it.
A small child, chubby with youth and rosy-cheeked, waved at her. After a brief hesitation, Marietta waved back. With a glance over her shoulder, Marietta approached the ice. The music emanated from two men with twirled beards and fluffy hats playing peculiar stringed instruments. They were situated on the other side of the looping river bend. As she neared the ice, she discerned that the river swept around a large town.
She saw wooden chalets, their sloping roofs dusted with snow, and taller constructions with swirling, whipped-cream peaks. A town square was crammed with little wooden huts, arranged in concentric circles through which more people bustled around a market. Beside that was the beginnings of a great frozen lake. A tall, sheer bridge crossed it at a vertiginous point, extending to a palace that belonged in a pâtisserie window. The palace and lake were wrapped in a cloak of sheer ice-cliffs, draped with wa
terfalls frozen mid-fall, glimmering under the starlight like Marietta’s sequinned Worth cape back home. Everything was edged with the encroaching fir trees.
A rustle sounded from the forest. Marietta stepped onto the ice with a shiver, desperate to lose herself within people and the twisting paths that drew to mind a Bavarian fairy tale of a town. Grappling for purchase in her satin shoes, she affected a gliding motion across the ice until she’d navigated her way over the river and back onto the snow of the opposite bank. When they were younger, they used to spend Christmas on their country estate up north, where Marietta would pester Frederick until he’d take her skating on their frozen lake. There, the ice had been rough and the wind harsh, filled with teeth and distant bird cries. Here, the ice was smooth and the skaters accomplished, their skates thin and light as wings.
A path presented itself. Pastel pink and lilac cobblestones. Marietta followed it into the town. As she passed the chalets, she discovered they weren’t wooden after all but frozen gingerbread. Icicles clustered along their slanted eaves. Other little dwellings were circular with the striped red and white of candy canes. She paused and grazed a wondering hand over the cobblestones, smiling with delight when she smelt marzipan. The path soon widened, pouring into the central circular market. Here, the air itself was sugared. Sweet and soft, like inhaling a wisp of lost cloud.
Small gingerbread huts perched on the marzipan cobblestones, with iced roofs and windows through which wondrous items and confectionery were being sold. Marietta wandered by, her heart full of that childlike wonder that leads young ones to await Father Christmas’s sleigh and stockings filled with sweets and toys by that nocturnal visitor, garbed in green. She wished she had never lost her belief in magic. Never set it aside when she grew older and it was no longer charming for her to still hold such beliefs. Perhaps then she might have trusted her instincts.
One hut offered molten chocolate in peppermint bowls; another, pale-pink sugar mice that squeaked once tasted; yet another, working gingerbread trains that chugged along candy cane tracks. And then there were the huts that whispered of grander shades of magic. The ones which sold keys in an assortment of shapes and sizes, vowing entry to the world of your choice. Silvered sleigh bells promised to ring the instant someone fell in love with you. Snow globes that revealed the viewer’s heart-dreams like a window cut into their souls. Marietta frowned and stole closer to examine one when a voice sent her thoughts spiralling.
A woman was leaning her elbows on the window of her hut, watching Marietta. She was almost concealed from sight by a plethora of dangling snow boots and a counter stacked with tiny peppermint fir trees, dipped in chocolate dark as night. She spoke in a curious tongue that Marietta was glad to find she could understand once she’d puzzled through the nuances of her accent.
‘From whence did you originate?’
Marietta hesitated.
The woman laughed, dissolving her eyes into a sea of crinkled parchment. ‘Alas, do not fret. We greet plenty of wanderers each moontide.’ She had the tiniest button of a nose, yet despite her easy laugh, her eyes remained cold.
Marietta kept a firm hand on her wits. ‘Might I inquire as to where I am?’
‘Why, you have discovered the delights of Everwood, of course. A land of ice and sugar, enchanted beyond measure. From which door did you seek entry?’
‘Do you mean to inform me that there are more worlds than mine and yours?’ Marietta’s mind whirred and ticked faster at the very notion.
The woman gave another hearty laugh. ‘There are many more than you or I could even guess at. Some are miniscule, entire universes in a space the size of a teacup. Others are grander than you could imagine. Though you must never forget, you yourself change to suit each one. The moment you stepped into Everwood, you were granted the ability to speak and understand our tongue. Other changes bear lasting consequences. My son once found himself made of wood in a land of puppets. He took haste to leave that one.’ Her eyes glazed over as she peered into her own memory. ‘Though his left knee still bears a stiff creak on a frozen day.’
Marietta’s head was set a-whirling, as if she’d been spinning in fouettés. ‘Oh dear,’ she managed.
‘Though in Everwood we’re well used to wanderers, of course. Lost souls have a habit of finding themselves here. It is always a little overwhelming at first, but my best advice to you would be to leave.’
Marietta was certain she had misheard. ‘I beg your pardon?’
The woman shrugged. ‘It’s a fine idea to have a taste of another world, a morsel to remember in future years when you’ve silvered and the stars are calling for you, but unfamiliar dangers cut the deepest.’ The smile melted from her face, her grey, lined eyes haggard in its absence. She nodded at the palace towering above the town, her voice whisper-soft. ‘I suggest you leave before you attract their attention.’
Marietta looked at the palace. Its peak punctured the star-speckled sky.
The woman retreated into her tangle of wares before reappearing with a pair of boots. She set them down on the gingerbread counter. The colour of fresh white wool, they were equipped with thick soles. ‘You have such strange shoes in your world.’ She cast a look at Marietta’s pointe shoes. ‘Mighty pretty but once the snow has invited itself onto your flesh, it won’t be long before you find yourself suffering from ice fever.’
Marietta resisted the urge to wrap her arms about herself. It was all she could do to keep her teeth from clattering together. She held her chin high and met the woman’s eyes. ‘They are perfectly lovely. Though I regret I’m not carrying any currency with me.’ Shame engulfed her in a sticky burst.
‘Your kind never do.’ The woman’s voice sharpened. ‘I would be happy to exchange them for the trinket adorning your hair.’ She pointed at the pearl comb Marietta still wore.
Marietta closed her fingers around it, considering. Her toes had grown numb in the bitter conditions and she feared frostbite. Yet the comb was laced with cultured Akoya pearls and worth far more than the trade the woman had offered. ‘I’m afraid this is rather dear to me as it was a gift from my mother,’ she hedged.
The woman softened. ‘How about that then?’ She nodded at the satin sash looping Marietta’s waist. ‘Or if you exchange those—’ she pointed at Marietta’s gold earrings ‘—I shall add this into the bargain.’ She bent beneath the counter and emerged with a cape in richest emerald, trimmed with gold. It looked thick and warm and Marietta felt the cold more keenly at the sight of it.
‘Very well.’ Marietta unfastened her earrings.
The woman seized them at once, her eyes agleam. ‘There’s always a pretty price to be fetched for a wanderer’s wares. That manner of crossing holds a magic all of its own.’ She slid the snow boots over to Marietta.
Sliding off her pointe shoes and the padding ensconcing her toes was a delicious relief. The snow boots were lined with a thick fluffy material that Marietta held no words for, as comfortable as treading upon the softest carpet. After fastening the cape round her shoulders, the chill lessened. She tied the ribbons of her ballet shoes together, draped them round her neck and thanked the woman.
She flapped a hand at Marietta. ‘Yes, yes, much obliged I’m sure. Now you must leave at once. The frozen sugar palace might look a delight to set your mouth a-watering but unspeakable cruelties have poisoned those candied halls.’
Marietta glanced once more at the distant palace. ‘Is it truly made of frozen sugar?’
‘Yes. Made by the Grand Confectioner himself. It’s a mastery of craft all confectioners in Sugar Alley aspire to. And cold enough to strip the skin from your bones.’
Marietta heeded her words and traced her path back. She had dwelt long enough in this peculiar place; Drosselmeier must have returned to the Christmas celebrations by now. Once Frederick heard of his unwanted advances, she hoped he would be cast from the townhouse. Still, she had a twinge of regret that she couldn’t stay and discover more of this enchanting place. Her walk slowed a
s she absorbed the scenes around her. Pillowy rolls baked in the shape of snowmen, the aroma reminiscent of bakeries she’d patronised in Paris. Snowflakes fashioned into jewellery, velvet mittens scented with vanilla. A vat of popcorn emitting curlicues of caramelised steam as the seller shovelled it into twists of paper. A large stall, grander than all, sold nothing but small glass vials of shimmering blue-green. Its sign advertised them as melting enchantments. As Marietta passed by, the sellers closed their gabled windows to the protests of the long queue outside.
When she took a wrong turn and found herself confronted with a stable, she halted. Miniature reindeer cavorted about, fluffy with stubby legs and antlers strung with tiny golden bells that jangled sweetly. Their formed antlers marked them as full grown yet they reached just the height of Marietta’s knee. She smiled before tearing herself away to cross the frozen river.
The lights and bustle of the town receded. Marietta trudged through the snow slower and slower, the cold permeating her bones. The fir trees closed behind her, enfolding her in their silence once more. Her fear of Drosselmeier fluttered anew, alongside a fresh worry; being preoccupied with fleeing him, she had failed to look back to take note of what the entrance to this world had looked like and she very much doubted she would happen to find the grandfather clock on a mound of snow to mark it. What if Drosselmeier’s plan was more nefarious than she had accounted for and she was destined to be trapped in this world? Her confusion settled deeper; she could not understand why he had sent her into such a delightful town.
She walked and walked until she was certain she had been walking further than she remembered. Worry edged into panic, needling her with its barbs. In each direction she turned, she faced giant firs and heaps of glittering snow. Nothing distinctive marked her path, no music or light could be gleaned from any which way she faced. It was all endless, silent forest. And once she had turned, she found she couldn’t recall the initial direction she had been headed for. It was possible she had twisted her route and was none the wiser. Perhaps Drosselmeier had never intended her to reach the darling town. Perhaps he only knew of this forest.
Midnight in Everwood Page 9
