The Circus Rose Read online

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Playbill

  1

  Rosie

  Ivory

  Rosie

  Ivory

  Rosie

  Ivory

  2

  Rosie

  Ivory

  Rosie

  3

  Ivory

  Rosie

  Ivory

  Rosie

  4

  Ivory

  Rosie

  Ivory

  Rosie

  Ivory

  Rosie

  Ivory

  5

  Ivory

  Rosie

  Ivory

  6

  Rosie

  Ivory

  7

  Rosie

  Ivory

  Rosie

  Ivory

  Rosie

  Ivory

  Rosie

  Ivory

  8

  Rosie

  Ivory

  Rosie

  Ivory

  Rosie

  Ivory

  Rosie

  Ivory

  9

  Ivory

  Rosie

  Ivory

  Rosie

  Ivory

  Rosie

  Ivory

  Rosie

  Ivory

  Rosie

  Ivory

  Rosie

  Ivory

  Rosie

  Ivory

  Rosie

  Ivory

  Rosie

  Ivory

  Rosie

  Ivory

  10

  Ivory

  Rosie

  Ivory

  Rosie

  Ivory

  Rosie

  Ivory

  Acknowledgments

  Sample Chapter from FOREST QUEEN

  Buy the Book

  More Books from HMH Teen

  About the Author

  Connect with HMH on Social Media

  Clarion Books

  3 Park Avenue

  New York, New York 10016

  Copyright © 2020 by Betsy Cornwell

  All rights reserved. For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  Clarion Books is an imprint of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.

  hmhbooks.com

  Art and cover illustration by Jim Tierney

  Cover design by Lisa Vega and Mary Claire Cruz

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Cornwell, Betsy, author.

  Title: The Circus Rose / Betsy Cornwell.

  Description: New York : Clarion Books, 2020. | Audience: Ages 12 and up. | Audience: Grades 7–9. | Summary: A retelling of Snow White and Rose Red in which teenage twins Ivory and Rosie battle evil religious extremists to save their loves and their circus family.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019029393 (print) | LCCN 2019029394 (ebook) | ISBN 9781328639509 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780358164432 (ebook)

  Subjects: CYAC: Twins—Fiction. | Sisters—Fiction. | Circus—Fiction. | Fanaticism—Fiction. | Lesbians—Fiction. | Bears—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.C816457 Cir 2020 (print) | LCC PZ7.C816457 (ebook) | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019029393

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019029394

  v1.0520

  For Kathrin,

  beloved sister

  The two children loved each other so dearly that they always walked about hand in hand whenever they went out together, and when Snow White said, “We will never desert each other,” Rose Red answered: “No, not as long as we live.”

  —“Snow White and Rose Red,” The Blue Fairy Book, eds. Andrew and Nora Lang, 1889

  Playbill

  IVORY, stagehand.

  ROSIE, acrobat. Ivory’s twin sister.

  “MAMA” ANGELA, founder and ringmistress of the Circus Rose. Ivory and Rosie’s mother.

  TAM, magician.

  VERA, strongwoman.

  TORO, chief clown and circus accountant.

  APPLE, stage manager.

  CIARAN, dancer.

  BONNIE, contortionist.

  BROTHER CAREY, abbot of the Brethren Church.

  LORD BRAM, a courtier. Ivory’s father.

  TOBIAS VALKO, a sailor. Rosie’s father.

  MISS LAMPTON, headmistress of the Lampton Girls’ School of Engineering.

  DIMITY, RACHIDA, CONSTANCE, FELICITY, and FAITH, students at Lampton.

  BEAR, a bear.

  1

  Rosie

  And now!

  Ladies, gentlemen, and Fey!

  Ivory

  Rosie and I are twins, but half sisters.

  It happened just how you’d guess, of course. Mama loved two men at the same time, and she slept with them both in the same month.

  When our fathers wanted her to choose between them, she left them both before she even knew that we were coming.

  We might as well have the same father, though, for all we saw of either of them as children. Two absent fathers are the same as one.

  But they’re different men, and people do insist on being shocked.

  Mismatched, half-sister twins are one thing. But our mother also being a bearded lady who had worked in what she lovingly called “the freak circuit” ever since she was a wispy-whiskered lass of fourteen years old?

  We’re circus through and through, Rosie and I. We never had a chance, not a chance, to be anything else.

  Rosie’s born to the performer’s life, though, in a way that I never was. I think she always feels a little cold without the heat of a spotlight on her skin. When she walks the tightrope with her arms outstretched, that wide, easy smile on her face, it’s as restorative for her as sunbathing. She floats between trapezes like a mermaid through a sunny sea, without a thought that the air would let her fall. And even when she’s simply dancing . . . oh, she shines.

  She shines, and the world basks in her light.

  I stick to the shadows.

  I switched teams, stepped out of the spotlight, and became a stagehand as soon as I realized I could. Mama, thank goodness, was kind about it. She killed off her double-act dreams without complaint, at least to me, and she asked the stage crew to show me the ropes, in both senses of the phrase.

  So I got to be behind the spotlight, and Rosie in front.

  Even then, of course, we shared it.

  Rosie

  Children of all ages!

  Ivory and I

  are twins, but

  half sisters.

  You might call us

  a sideshow act.

  Presenting,

  But here’s a

  truth, and no

  mistake:

  for your

  entertainment and pleasure:

  a great performer

  is a double

  act

  The Rose of the Circus Rose!

  all by herself.

  Ivory

  By the time I was old enough to hold on to memories, Mama had assembled a troupe of about a dozen performers. She’d always wanted the Circus Rose to grow, to become the biggest act of its kind on the three continents.

  There was no crew, though, just her and Vera and Toro, frantically stage-managing between their own acts. Everyone worked triple duty as cast and crew and babysitter for Rosie and me: we played and ate and slept under the watch
ful eyes of contortionists, conjoined twins, albinos, acrobats, equestrians, lion tamers, clowns, dancers.

  Finally, in exhaustion, in desperation, Mama admitted she needed a stage manager.

  The circus had set up in Esting City, but Mama had been forced to shut down performances when, after opening night, religious protesters blocked the ticket booth. Exactly which part of the circus had offended them was never clear when Mama told the story later, but when she and Vera went out to confront them, things quickly became physical.

  No one has ever told Rosie and me the extent of what happened. But a Brethren priest in the crowd grabbed Mama by the beard and would have—

  I still don’t know. No one will say.

  A huge man who had hoped to buy a ticket for the show got between Mama and the brother. When the priest still wouldn’t let her go, the man pulled out a knife and cut her free.

  The big man’s name was Apple.

  “It took me months to grow my beard back,” Mama always said. “I only forgave him because of what else I might have lost if he hadn’t been there. And because of all he’s done for us since, of course.”

  Apple would always duck his head when she praised him, when anyone praised him, to hide his smile and his ruddy cheeks. He was the first person I ever met besides myself who was quiet. Is it any wonder, in a circus?

  Apple was a carpenter by trade. He offered to help Mama and Vera repair the ticket booth that had been damaged in the protest.

  When the circus left town, he left with us; nothing to keep him at home, he said. He became the stage manager, the foreman of a crew that slowly grew along with Mama’s roster of performers.

  I admired him: his silent strength, his bashfulness. I started following Apple around backstage as soon as I was old enough not to get into mischief, which was earlier for me than for Rosie. I watched him and the crew building their sets and handling the ropes, and I learned to help them.

  I wanted to build things, to stay behind the scenes, like Apple did. I think he was the first person I’d ever seen who found a way to shine outside the limelight.

  Rosie

  Mama started

  her circus

  without us—

  so she thought.

  Double pearls,

  someday girls,

  held blood in

  her belly,

  while we

  waited in

  the wings.

  Mama, lone,

  both lovers gone,

  found a new

  dream to romance

  instead: a circus,

  a living, a life.

  She hired Vera

  first, strong-

  woman from

  the freak

  circuit they’d

  both worked

  as just-past

  girls. As women,

  they had found

  lives far apart.

  But Vera always

  says time

  doesn’t matter,

  nor distance, to

  a true friend’s heart.

  Hers remembered

  Mama right away.

  (And Vera’s name,

  don’t you know,

  means the truth.)

  What a glorious start

  to a circus of roses:

  a bearded woman and one

  who can throw,

  without the slightest

  effort, any

  man to the ground.

  By the time

  we made

  our presence known,

  Mama had Vera

  and Toro, too,

  the brilliant clown

  who was more

  brilliant still

  with the books.

  A business born

  with us, a triplet

  who shares

  my name. More

  like me than

  Ivory,

  the sweet, quiet

  sister who thinks,

  only, always,

  in straight

  lines.

  Ivory

  When I was fourteen, the same age Mama had been when she ran away and joined the circus, she let me enroll in the Lampton Girls’ School of Engineering outside of Esting City. I’d been pulling things apart to see how they worked ever since I was old enough to control my hands, and at that school, girls and women of all ages came together to learn the workings of machines for themselves. I had dreamed of becoming an engineer all my life, and the story of Nicolette Lampton—Mechanica, the girl inventor who’d won our king’s heart but chose to open the Lampton School instead of becoming his queen—had enchanted me ever since I’d first heard it.

  A circus is all about illusion, wonder, people lining up to see something impossible. For most circusgoers, wonder is the goal.

  For me, it’s the beginning. All the illusions ever did was dare me to find out why and how.

  I longed to be a Lampton’s girl, but I was terrified of leaving the circus behind. The truth was, though, I found it stifling. That crush of people around us all the time, the performers and crew and crowds and crowds and again more crowds, and Mama calling each and every one of them family. Mama had room for all of them in her heart, down to every last audience member. She loved them as soon as they entered the fairground or came into the tent. Sometimes I thought Mama’s heart must look like a playbill, but I told myself Rosie and I were her headliners.

  When I left for school, I wanted for once to headline my own life.

  Rosie and I had shared every second of our lives with the entire Circus Rose, not to mention with each other. I had no idea who I would be if I were by myself—not a twin, not a daughter, not part of a crew.

  Just Ivory.

  The thing is, even my name isn’t simply my own. It’s a duet with my sister’s.

  Ivory and Rosie, named for the colors of our hair when we were born.

  I came first, with hardly a cry at all, a coily nimbus of white on my crown, a serious look on my face.

  Rosie followed two minutes later, squalling fit to break glass, her hair a bright slick of red that Mama thought at first was only more blood from the birthing.

  For just those two minutes, we were both alone, Rosie and I. I spent them thinking, and she spent them frightened.

  That about sums up how each of us feels about solitude.

  Mama had planned to name her baby Rose, boy or girl, after the circus she’d so proudly founded. She did not expect two babies, but when she saw us, she thrilled to the prospect of our double act, picturing the posters already.

  She chose our names the same way she would have if we’d come to her looking for a paying gig: she named us what would draw a crowd. She drew an equal sign between us with our names, one that said we were the same even as it showcased our difference.

  White-haired Ivory, red-haired Rosie. Gentle and quiet, fiery and bright.

  Snow White. Rose Red.

  We are different. We are the same.

  I dreamed, and was afraid, of breaking free.

  But at fourteen years old, standing at the front door of the engineering school, Mama’s hand in mine for what would be the last time until the end of the school year, I felt something I had never felt before.

  I knew what it would mean to leave my family, and I felt guilty—about leaving Mama, to be sure, but even more about leaving Rosie.

  Rosie’s never had an easy time in the world, you see, for all the joy she takes in performing. Too much of that light and sound she loves, too much brightness and noise, too much of anything pushing in at her senses for too long overwhelms her, and her mind—it just panics. Her thoughts retreat in on themselves until she can’t speak, until she can’t understand anything that’s being said to her, either.

  The only cure for Rosie, once she’s frozen in overwhelm like that, is to go somewhere dark and quiet, and to rest there for a long time, maybe hours, maybe a day, with someone she loves. Not ever alone.

  Since the
day we were born, that person was me—even before then. After all, we shared a womb before we were ourselves. I was always the person who was best at bringing Rosie back to the world, at lying patient and still with her in the dark and breathing slowly enough that she would start to match her breath to mine.

  At least, I was best at it until Bear.

  2

  Rosie

  Bear came

  to me

  from the north.

  We were so

  young, Ivory and I,

  round cheeked,

  baby bellied:

  young enough that we

  weren’t yet ourselves

  to anyone else.

  “The girls,” “the twins,”

  two buds on one

  branch. Just seven

  summers old.

  Ivory was only

  another me

  until the day

  a beast came

  in from the cold.

  At the edge

  of the campfire light,

  Bear rose.

  The troupe,

  to the last,

  fled.

  Even Ivory. Even Mama.

  Trying their best

  to pull me along.

  But I,

  I alone,

  would not be kept away.

  I made Bear

  a shy curtsey

  at the fire’s edge.

  Bear bowed in reply.

  I held out my small

  child’s hand.

  Bear took my palm

  in one great paw

  and kissed it

  clean. A murmur bloomed

  from the shadows around us,

  wondering applause.

  Mama exclaimed:

  “Why, he’s tame as a pet!

  Just what the Circus

  Rose needs.” Ever