Page 12 of The Scarlet Ball

I choked back a laugh, because I was still alive and because he looked like a man, and I knew how to deal with those. I came to take his arm.

“I am very well, Grandfather,” I said, going to sit with him on the oxblood chesterfield sofa. “Very well, if a little tired.”

“Yes, you were out late with us at the de Langes’ place last night. Those things do run on, don’t they? And deadly dull into the bargain, sometimes.”

I could wish that he hadn’t used that word. If I thought too long on the amethyst girl, I would lose all my nerve, but instead I smiled, daring to lean against him like some white girl who thought she had nothing to fear.

“Perhaps a bit,” I said, “but there was a girl there with the most cunning little emerald stickpin, and I thought that if I had one in sapphire, perhaps it would go well with a certain dress that Grandmama has gotten for me.…”

A FEW MINUTES later, I left Mr. Howard’s study with a fold of bills in my hand, and crossed the hall to where the lady’s private sitting room mirrored the gentleman’s study. I entered without knocking, and Mrs. Howard did not raise her head from her embroidery hoop.

“I might have been burnt to a crisp, and you’re embroidering,” I said, closing the door behind me. She put in another two stitches to show me how little she cared for my judgment. I took the chair next to her, sitting with my knees tight and my back straight, and helped myself to the untouched butter cookies that were stacked like gold coins on a porcelain dish.

“My mother’s family were whalers,” she said. “If you grow too fat, I’ll cut the excess away to make you fit Iphigenia’s clothes.”

I ate another cookie in defiance, and she gave an aggrieved sigh, laying her hoop aside.

“Have you seen enough?”

“I wanted an answer, not a test.”

“Get used to disappointment. You are in service, and every mistress reserves the right to test her staff.”

“That isn’t an answer. What is he? I can see that he is only a man sometimes.”

“God forfend, he is never a man,” she said. “I have made my own inquiries, employed a historian in Brussels, another in Cairo. He is most likely a wildfire from the Caucasus. He burned for three years during the time of the Romans, and somewhere in the remote mountains, the remnants of the city of Apollonia are still blackened with his fire.”

She spoke, and I knew the truth of it. There were the friendly fires of the cookstove and the hearths, romantic candlelight and the tiny flames at the end of spills that we used to light our cigarettes. Then there was the fire that had torn through Chicago, so large we had even heard of it in Paris, so hot it had burned away the mortality of some caught in its heart and left them immortal. There was the fire that had wanted nothing more than to consume the boardinghouse I lived in and how greedy even that little thing was.

“You may call them demons, if you like. I understand my ancestresses called them friends, their great good friends. My mother called them small gods. Mostly we call them our lords, and that is as good a word as any for what they are and what we do with them.”

“And what do you do with them?”

She gave me a cold and unfriendly smile.

“What might a wildfire or a hundred-year flood do if it loved you?”

“Threaten,” I mused, “kill if necessary, destroy when it is allowed to. And, I suppose, wear good clothes and sit at table.”

“It is an exchange, as everything is,” she said. “They need to eat, we need to feed them, and when something like that loves you above all things, why, you become its favorite food. Still. Every clever woman knows what it is to sacrifice parts of herself to secure her place in the world. How lucky I am that Henry eats slowly and will move such mountains for me.”

I would learn later that mountains had literally been moved. The Howards owned land out West, and, untroubled by the people who had lived there all along, Mr. Howard had lifted the mountains and bled the ore from them, rivulets of copper flowing out of the rock to be turned into miles and miles of wire.

“And all of New York’s society families, the Four Hundred—”

“Of course not,” she said dismissively. “A handful at best. Can you imagine some new-come sea captain’s daughter with the nerve and breeding to do this? Some girl whose family line started with the price of a goat herd and a smile? No. I would say perhaps thirty families are capable of sending a daughter to dance the Scarlet Ball. Perhaps a dozen out of any given generation can do it, perhaps half that. Sometimes two, sometimes none. This is the first such season we have been able to muster in ten years, and that more than fifteen years after the one before.”

“And this is what you want for your granddaughter.”

“Power and safety? The love of something that will be far truer than any mortal man would be? A place among the great? Of course I do.”

There was a missing place at the table, that of Scylla Howard, Mrs. Howard’s daughter, the lost Iphigenia’s mother. Mrs. Howard had wanted that for her too, and now she was gone. I did not speak of it, instead flicking crumbs from my fingers under Mrs. Howard’s disapproving gaze.

“And all I need to do is wear some white girl’s face and stand in Iphigenia Marshall’s stead. When she returns, I step aside, she can take her try at marrying a flood or a wildfire or an earthquake or a gale, and then I’m free.”

“Yes.”

“You said that too fast,” I told her. “I don’t believe you.”