the point where the gaslights ended, the sun had crested the horizon.
Within an hour, they were well outside the city. Had the watcher recognized what was going on last night, or had he concentrated on Giselle, and missed the fact that the show tent was coming down, the midway packed up, and the canvas walls packed away? She had tried to stay away from all that activity, hoping to mislead him if all he was watching was her.
She’d never felt his gaze this early; it always began around midmorning, as if he was a late riser. With any luck, she thought, as she chirped to the horses, and got them past a pushcart they were eyeing with suspicion, by the time he wakes up, he won’t be able to find us.
It felt good to be on the road again.
They were by no means the first to leave the Oktoberfest, but also not the last, merely the largest. The enormous beer tents were all put up by local bierkelleren, and were coming down today; the pretty girls that waited on the tables would go back to their regular lives, as daughters and housewives. This was a yearly bounty of income that many counted on to pay for Christmas.
Smaller shows had left earlier to get into winter quarters. Most of the single-tent shows had stayed, getting the last pfennig they could eke out before the lean season—or at least, before they could do some business at the Christkindlesmarkt here or in another city.
But soon, they would all be gone, and there would be nothing festive until it was time for the Christkindlesmarkt. That would not be held in the great field, but in the city square and spill out into the streets beyond it. Stalls would have everything that one could want to prepare for Christmas: gifts, decorations, baked goods, foods from the potatoes to the goose to be roasted. There would be food to eat and hot things to drink, because shopping was a taxing business. And since people needed to be entertained while they shopped, there would be that, too, although it would have to compete with groups singing carols and the local brass bands. Many of the people of Freiburg who had come to meet Giselle had asked if she and the company were staying for Christmas, and had described the Christkindlesmarkt in great detail.
She wished she could see it. As so many things, since she had spent all of her life alone in the abbey with Mother, she had never seen a Christkindlesmarkt. It sounded delightful, and a great deal less overwhelming than the Oktoberfest had been. It would have been even better, since she would not have been performing, but would have had leisure to see and do things herself.
Another year, perhaps. This time next year the show would be on its way home to America, hopefully with everyone’s pockets stuffed full of money. And she could come to Freiburg, stay in a nice little hotel, shop, go to a play and concerts, see the university and the cathedral . . . and surely by then, the vexing problem of the unseen watcher would have been solved.
Meanwhile it was far more important to get this entire cavalcade back to the abbey and under stout shelter before the worst of the winter weather set in. Christmas would be great fun with all of them there. She wasn’t sure how Americans celebrated it, but given the zest with which they met any occasion to celebrate, they surely had some delightful, if slightly mad, traditions themselves. There probably wasn’t enough goose in the district to feed all of them, but there would be plenty of other things, and already Kellermann had sent wagonload after wagonload of supplies ahead. And this would be the first Christmas she had ever spent with so much company!
And finally, at long last, after four solid weeks, she could look forward to an entire day in which she could be herself, and not “Rio Ellie.” Today would be an entire day in which she would not be performing—for sitting there in her “camp” and answering questions was performing, an even more intense sort of performance than being in front of the audience in the arena had been.
“I am so glad we are going!” One of the sylphs flitted up out of nowhere, her pale-blue butterfly wings looking altogether out of place amid the falling leaves. “There are too many people in that place. And too many