Page 19 of The Scarlet Ball

“I do not have friends.”

“You could start.”

Her face didn’t budge, setting deeper into what I already considered her balked-cat expression.

“If you have breath enough to speak, you have breath enough to dance. Come on.”

Mielle pulled me to my feet, and we began again.

THE SNACKS MIELLE doled out aside, the last few days leading up to the White Ball were miserable. Storms brewing out over the Atlantic had come to break themselves on New York, and now the city was pummeled with water, the late afternoons and evenings rocked with thunder and lightning. Sunlight slipped through knife-thin rips in the clouds like gold falling from a slit purse, and throughout it all, I was aware of Mrs. Howard’s growing anger.

She stalked the house like some great and discontented cat, and the only time she relaxed at all, that I ever saw the lines of her face ease to something that could be considered close to pleasure, was when Mr. Howard came to her. I caught them in the front hall late one night, driven from my bed by an overtired restlessness that had me sneaking down to the kitchen to see if I could find some food. From the banister, I saw her at the door, sitting in the narrow alcove where a footman might settle himself waiting for late guests to arrive. She stared out the small round window into the rain, more a ghost than the wispy thing I had caught glimpses of in the hallway from time to time, and I would have gone on if Mr. Howard hadn’t approached, crossing the foyer with something draped over his arm. He moved so silently that for a moment I thought he was looking to catch her unguarded, stalking her as if she were a mouse.

I almost called out to her, but then he was at her back and no warning would have saved her. She would have seen his reflection in the glass—I wondered if his reflection might smile, show off that honest thing of teeth and hunger right before he bit through the knot of hair to her scalp and the crunch of her skull.

He didn’t do that. Instead, he draped a striped blanket over her, and when she turned to him, she looked at him with such weary gratitude it made something in my chest snap. It was love, I thought, and just then, there was nothing terrible about them at all. They were only a man and a woman who cared for one another. She missed her granddaughter. He missed his wife from his bed. As I watched, she allowed him to help her up and to drape the blanket around her shoulders against the chill. Then she took his arm and followed him to the stairs, and I remembered at last where I was.

I fled light-footed back to my room, closing the door after me as quietly as I could. A moment later, I heard them pass, the softness of their footsteps, her breath, his lack, and then they were gone to their beds.

I turned with relief at not being caught, and stifled a shriek when I saw Mielle seated in one of the chairs, watching me in the light of the gas lamps turned low.

“You ought not wander late at night.”

“You’re not truly free unless you can go raid the larder for a bite to eat at midnight,” I said with a shrug. “I thought I was hungry.”

“If you are hungry, I will fetch you a tray.” She paused. “They are not always so kind or so absent-minded. You must be careful of who you meet in the dark.”

THE MORNING OF the White Ball, Mielle woke me before dawn for breakfast, which was taken in Mrs. Howard’s private rooms. I wasn’t sure what I expected when I entered, but it was not the pair of rough doglike stone statues seated at her hearth. As crudely as they were fashioned, they should have been out of place, but I knew them for what they were, how quickly they could leap up if a maid decided to pocket a teacup or a footpad found his way to this sacred interior, how those feet would snap spines and those jaws would break heads. I turned my head away from them, examining the rest of the room so that I would not have to look at their cruel chiseled fangs.

Mrs. Howard kept a clean space, the walls plain save for a mural of closed-eyed angels, hands folded in prayer. With its dark rugs over the pale wood floors, it felt dreadfully, emptily holy. It was the room of some Renaissance abbess, austere and strict, who was nonetheless descended from nobility—she honored her vows, but the wealth was in the details.

“It is the custom for young ladies to dine with their mothers on the morning of the White Ball,” she said, sensing my curiosity at being allowed into such an intimate setting. “It is a moment of quiet and contemplation for them both, a time undisturbed by what will come, and of course it allows them to break their fast in peace before all the tumult begins.”

When the maid appeared with the covered trays, however, I was offered nothing but an egg in a cup on my plate. Scowling at the mean fare, I cut off the top to find not soft white and gold inside but a tightly curled chick, the yolk mostly gone, just beginning to get feathers.

“Your egg dealer ought to be shot,” I said drily, and beside me, enjoying bacon and somewhat more common eggs, Mrs. Howard frowned.

“It is tradition.”

“It’s an egg left so long it was almost a chicken before it was cooked.”

“It’s a reminder of sorts,” Mielle offered from behind me. “It is served to young ladies before the White Ball as a message. In their dresses, they are perfect, inviolable, and unmarked. Underneath it … it is a different story.”

“Underneath, inside, they’re what, ugly? Miserable? A little dead already?”

“If you have not the stomach for it—” Mrs. Howard began, but then I simply swished the tiny egg spoon around in the egg, macerating the chick, breaking what remained of the yolk to pieces. When I was sure that I had Mrs. Howard’s attention and Mielle’s, I lifted the egg between two fingers and threw it back like a shot of whisky before dropping its brittle shell on my plate again.

My mother had told me about this delicacy when I was very young, how when she was at home in Vietnam she and her siblings would run out into the street looking for a particular seller whose barrow swung with eggs in mesh fabric. Some of the eggs were large, some small, most white, some speckled with brown or red. The vendor kept fertilized chicken eggs in a basket hung around her waist, and for a few cents, she would hand you a pair of them, filled just as this one was with a tiny chick who had been cooked before its time.

I had been so curious about this snack that I paid a chef an impressive amount of cash to re-create it for me one night in a small exquisite gallery off the Avenue Montaigne. He had prepared a round dozen as part of a midnight feast, and the way that I knew they had come to table was that another girl shrieked to see one, throwing her opened egg onto the fire on the hearth.

For my part, I was delighted. I ate most of them myself, one after another, sprinkling a bit of salt, pepper, and lemon juice on the undeveloped chick before drinking it down like good brandy. I imagine in An Giang, where my mother hailed from and eventually returned to, there was a culture of eating them beautifully and delicately. Society girls, even the ones who had come to stand for marriage to demons, would eat them with pale faces and tiny bites.

I had none of that, instead chewing with relish. It was astonishingly delicate meat with bones so brittle they melted between your teeth, a mouthful rather than a meal, and when I finished, I was disappointed not to have another.

“You little beast,” Mrs. Howard said, and I shrugged before remembering that ladies didn’t.

“You did not choose me to watch me flinch,” I reminded her.