If Neustadt had been a kind of dress rehearsal, then Freiburg was the full production.

The show was but one part of the enormous Oktoberfest carnival, which covered an area that was itself the size of a small city. The Oktoberfest field played host to huge tented beer halls able to hold hundreds of people at a time, to vendors of every sort of food and goods, to amusement rides, and musical entertainments and exhibitions—well, anything that you could fit under a tent and make money doing, you would find here just past the two pillars that marked the entrance to the field. On their weekly day off—the Captain and Kellermann chose Tuesday, at the request of the other shows—the company really didn’t have to leave the grounds to get pretty much anything they wanted. And more often than not, they didn’t ever have to pay. If it wasn’t for the vendors themselves giving them food and drink and entertainment just for the “draw” their presence made, it was random strangers thrusting drink and food and presents into their hands. Convinced that she and Rosa were Americans, the two girls had found themselves gifted with dirndls and blouses, shawls and embroidered stockings, and urged to “wear these when you go home and think of us.” All the women in the show had been gifted with these garments, but most of them had been given to Rosa and Giselle because they were most often together outside the show environs, and people seemed to be under the impression that they were sisters. It was a reasonable assumption, being as they were both blond and rather typically Bavarian in looks.

Carefully putting the latest of these away into storage in the morning, Giselle wondered if she would need new gowns for the next twenty years—so long as she stayed the same size! At this point, I think I have a dirndl in every color of the rainbow, she thought, patting the latest, a blue one, a bit flatter. If the last two weeks were anything to go on, she’d be needing room for more.

Rosa found these gifts terribly amusing, which Giselle understood, knowing what Rosa usually wore, as well as the fact that dirndls would probably raise amused eyebrows when she spent time in the household of her patron, the Graf. Giselle could imagine . . . barely . . . the sort of outfits that Rosa probably wore. Much more stylish and fashionable than those of the good ladies of Freiburg.

But she suspected that the ladies who gifted the two of them with these dresses fondly assumed that, for them, this would be . . . fashionable. They’d never recognize Rosa if they ever saw her in one of those gowns.