Page 18 of The Scarlet Ball

After that, she’d get me undressed and serve me a proper meal, often my first of the day. It was seen as wise for girls to starve a bit before the events. It kept us from throwing up out of nerves or needing to maneuver those fancy clothes overmuch in a powder room, but more than that, I think it kept us docile and woolly-headed, even when we were impressing bankers and industrialists rather than demons. When Mielle put a plate of curried cold rabbit or roast beef under gravy with slices of white bread in front of me, it was like my vision cleared and I could think properly again. Dinner, eaten in my shift and stockings with Mielle humming softly as she hung up my dress and cleaned my slippers with a coarse brush, was the thing that largely made this all bearable.

What was less bearable was hearing Mrs. Howard’s stormy voice in the hall, raised over the ivory-and-brass telephone in her parlor. Ginny was in Quebec, or perhaps she was in Chicago. Someone had seen her board an ocean liner to Barcelona or perhaps to Athens. Someone swore they heard her voice issuing from a brilliant green parrot being shipped all the way to Shanghai, someone else saw her on her back in one of the cribs down by the docks.

Wherever Ginny was, she was not to be found. Mrs. Howard grew grimmer as the days passed and the White Ball approached. In France, the white balls were held for the unmarried girls of the season. In Mrs. Howard’s world, the White Ball was something else, and finally, with no other choice acceptable to her, she decided that I would go.

Six

The morning Mrs. Howard gave the order to prepare me for the White Ball, Mielle dressed me in a heavy Atlas silk dress in a bright rose color that left my arms and my throat bare. There was a modest ruffle of expensive lace ringing the neckline, and it was charmed to give off the faintest strains of a tinny one-two-three waltz, mostly audible to me and to anyone I would be conversing with. It was charming, the kind of thing a girl in the schoolroom might sigh over. I could have cordially torn the ruff clean off the dress and trampled it so I didn’t have to listen to that tinkling melody anymore.

“I may stab out my ears if I have to listen to this all day,” I told Mielle as we walked to the ballroom.

“I would not,” she said as she unlocked the door. “It gives you practice in listening for the important things while ignoring the noise.”

“What important things should I be listening for?”

“You must always be on your guard in the presence of the lords. If they catch you unawares, they will certainly eat you.”

“Oh, that sounds pleasant.”

“You may be assured that it is not,” she said, and she straightened the collar and cuffs of the suit she was suddenly wearing. It looked like it had been tailored for her and I put that away for later, because if she could change her clothes, I would bet money she could change the rest.

She offered me her gloved hand, but stopped me when I went to take it.

“That is not how you accept a dance from one of the lords. Head up, and eyes down. There is never a reason for a well-bred young lady to meet a lord’s eyes. At most you may glance at his lips, but it is safer to stay on his chin or below it. You must remember this.”

“I will, I will.”

She paused, staring at me as if I was a lamb that didn’t know why it had come to a pen stained with blood and tufts of wool.

“Everything I say to you has been written in blood with pens carved from the bones of women like you. To you, everything is deadly, and if you wish to survive it, let alone walk away with that pretty house you dream of, you would do well to remember that. Here, when I offer you my hand, you simply rest your fingertips on my palm, no weight. There. That’s right. Your hand goes on top, you stand to the lord’s right.”

“And if I wish to refuse the dance?”

“There are ways to refuse, even ways to refuse without giving offense,” she said thoughtfully. “But you must first be certain that you can enforce that refusal. At the outset, for the White Ball, you will not be refusing.”

Until today, she had been teaching me to dance with men. Before we started, I would have said that I knew that already, but I could see how far I had come. The trick for these people was never doing a thing well, but doing it perfectly. Perfect was the expectation, and anything less was a few inches of newsprint for the papers Mrs. Howard had me reading. Now Mielle was teaching me to dance with demon lords, and even perfect might not be enough.

Of course I knew the waltz and its variations: the Viennese, which street children in Paris did for thrown coins, the valse lente, which was good for a nap if you’d been on your feet all night, the zwiefacher and all its adorable little Bavarian children. I wondered if Mielle would be teaching me some rare and infernal variation, but instead it was all the same steps with a list of added rules that resembled those that came with dealing with street dogs. How to move and not to move, where to put your eyes and your hands, when to run and when you absolutely could not run.

“Sometimes,” she said, watching me as I lay on the floor to stretch out my aching back and legs, “it is best to stand still and only to be eaten a little bit rather than to run and to be eaten entire.”

“Are you speaking from experience?” As far as I could tell Mielle had all her parts.

“Everything has an appetite.” She gestured that I should get up, ignoring my groan. “Come on. The Viennese, again.”

Even though I could see how much I had improved in just a few weeks, she still took fault with everything from the way I stood to how I held my mouth, to how much sound or how little I made with my heels on the floor. The only time I knew I was doing something right was when she blinked, a slow lowering of her ridiculously long eyelashes before she proceeded to the next thing, at which I would invariably fail.

The morning of the day before the White Ball, she gave me a plate of apple slices and cheese as a treat while I rested from my efforts, served along with a pot of butter and toasted bread. I ate with more gratitude than I wanted to, giving her a baleful look. She never tired, I had never seen her sleep, she never ate. Even now, she was wiping a scrap of the good butter from her finger with an immaculate handkerchief. An ordinary girl would have licked it up but it was less than nothing to her.

“The lords,” I said abruptly. “What are they, your older brothers? Your fathers? You’re a sight more like them than you are like me.”

“I am not here to tutor you on the finer niceties of our kind.”

“Oh, then you are of a kind? I can see you’re something to each other, from some strange land or some strange mother.”

Mielle looked chagrined to have me even guess that much, her head pulling back like that of a balked cat. I laughed out loud because I could see that I had the right of it.

“Don’t be cross,” I told her with a grin. It felt good to have something to smile at in this house. “Foreign born, strange relatives, bad attitude, that’s all the best people, didn’t you know? A lot of my friends were like that. Shall we be friends?”