Page 14 of The Scarlet Ball

Five

I will say this for Mrs. Howard: She moved fast. By that evening, most of the staff had been sent on their way except for the skeleton crew needed to keep Howard House from floundering like a ship with all hands washed off deck.

The dismissed servants were called one at a time to attend Mrs. Howard at her secretary in the parlor. There she paid out the remainder of their wages and removed from them the memories of their time in Howard House, which she threw neatly into the fire; they would be sent for again if it was appropriate, and she hoped that God would bless them in the time to come if it was right that he should do so. The few who remained were bound with symbolic stitches placed at the corners of their eyes and their mouth. They’d perform their work as well as before, but what they saw and could speak about was severely restricted.

“You cannot do such a thing when you host, of course, but if we do so at all this season, I can hire out-of-house staff,” Mrs. Howard told me, putting her delicate tools away. “Honestly, it was long overdue.”

From the window, Mrs. Howard and I watched as the housekeeper departed, the one who had threatened me my first night at Howard House.

“She’s known Iphigenia all her life,” Mrs. Howard said. “In fact, she was the one who began the custom of calling her Ginny. I shouldn’t think but she had a hand in my granddaughter’s ruin.”

“Not ruined. Ruined means there’s no hope of restoring her to what she was. Isn’t that what you’re trying to do?”

Mrs. Howard’s look was dark. “Ruined is ruined, and it goes all the way down, no matter who you have sent away or what revenge you have taken. Once ruined, always ruined. I would think one such as you would know that.”

I shrugged, because my own ruin had been a shockingly pleasant thing.

“In any case, it is no business of mine, but I hardly think that you will like the idea of playing lady’s maid to me for the duration. What are you—”

I stopped because we had been alone in the parlor and suddenly, we were not. The girl who stood demurely by was short with a piquant face and a scatter of freckles across her nose. She looked like so many ladies’ maids I’ve known, dull blond hair with big brown eyes, inoffensively pretty and serviceable in every way. She was shorter than I was, thinner and angular in a way that had nothing to do with hunger and everything to do with the shape of her bones. She looked like she was built of wire and only softened by the clothes she wore; it came to me she was only a dressmaker’s form, a thing to display her uniform’s crisp lines and stark black. I was less concerned with her looks than I was with the fixedness of her gaze, and when I tried to stare her down, she never blinked. She only looked away from me when Mrs. Howard snapped her fingers.

“I’ve named her Mielle. She will see to all of your needs and give you the instruction that you need. Of course she will not gossip.”

“Of course she won’t,” I murmured, and it disturbed me how easy it was to simply speak about her in front of her face.

“Where do you come from?” I asked. “What sort of thing are you?”

Her gaze shifted indifferently to me, as if she had merely noticed some fluttering leaf or unusual ripple in the water. Her eyes were the warmest brown despite her cool looks.

“I am in Mrs. Howard’s service, and I have been engaged for your improvement, your instruction, and your protection.”

Smooth to the point of insult, she curtsied, and it came to me that Mrs. Howard should have stitched that bastard’s face to hers instead. Here was the perfect thing she could direct and control, and I knew that this one, with her fixed gaze that was little sister to Mr. Howard’s own, would never flinch from a minor thing like a girl ripped open. So there was a reason that Mrs. Howard hadn’t, and I reminded myself that she wasn’t some girl to be baited to tears.

“Let’s be friends,” I said, because sometimes that was all it took, and I offered her my hand. For a moment, I thought she wouldn’t take it, but then she did, the knife sharpness of her thumbnail tracing my knuckles.

“She will not obey you,” Mrs. Howard said. “She is here for one reason and one reason only, and that is to do whatever it will take to prepare you for what lies ahead. As it is, she is already falling behind.”

Mielle took my hand more firmly and led me away. A quick glimpse over my shoulder showed Mrs. Howard already returning to her desk, the memories of more than a dozen servants smoldering on the hearth, and I hurriedly turned to face front so that Mielle would not be able to steer me into the wall for the joke of it.

“No need to be in such a hurry,” I protested. “I haven’t done so poorly on my own that there’s any great emergency, is there?”

The look she threw over her shoulder was so skeptical I laughed, and the echo of it sounded strange in Howard House. Christ, what had it been like for Ginny, growing up here? I put her out of my mind, for she was not my business. Instead, Mielle was, or rather, I was hers.

The room I had come to think of as mine had undergone a transformation while I was gone. The mess I had made had been cleaned up, as if it had never been. This was how the great houses operated, and there was no magic behind it, just the labor of servants grateful to be kept from the workhouses or the streets another night, but still I stared until Mielle led me to the bathing room.

It was a small chamber done over in gilt and rose-red tile, an enormous white enamel tub set on a pedestal with a seat nearby for a lady’s maid. There was a contraption of slender brazen pipes built up along one end that looked somewhere between a rib cage and a torture device, but this Mielle ignored as she turned a tap and the tub started to fill with impossibly hot water.

She went after my clothes like a particularly keen ferret, whisking them off me until I was bare and then handing me into the tub. The water steamed, turning my skin red immediately, and I wanted nothing more than to lie down in it, to let it scald me clean. I started to sink into the water, but Mielle tapped my chin. With a sigh, I settled against the slanted back, letting her rinse out my hair before pinning it on top of my head.

“Can you be trusted to clean yourself properly?”

Irritated, I flicked a few droplets of water in her direction, which she bore stoically.

“Why, do you want to do it? Of course I can. Go wait in the other room.”

Once she was gone and I was alone, however, I found myself regretting it. The last time I had been in a bath this hot and this luxurious, I hadn’t been alone. He had gotten in first, and I had decided I didn’t want to wait for the hot water. I climbed in on top of him, nearly getting us stuck, and when I leaned in to kiss him, I’d slipped, and my teeth gashed his lower lip. We laughed so hard—

I took a deep breath and plunged under the water. I stayed there until my breath ran out, and then I surfaced like some leviathan from the Bible, sloshing water on the floor, my hair falling down around me like the pelt of some submarine animal. There was a small shelf set into the wall beside the tub, and I dumped oil and salt into the water before grabbing a pumice stone to scrub. Then for good measure, I stood up inside the metal rib cage. With a pull of the cord, a shower of cool water sluiced down on my head, and I remained under it until I shivered.