Midnight in Everwood is out in paperback now! Read on for an enchanting extract and lose yourself in the magical world of Everwood…
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
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 waterfalls 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.
Midnight in Everwood is out now! Available on the links below.
- Amazon standard edition
- Waterstones special edition
Exclusive independent bookshop edition also available, with stunning sprayed edges! Get yours now by contacting your local independent bookshop.
