Page 20 of The Scarlet Ball

She had chosen me, among other things, to wear beautiful dresses. Over the weeks previous, I had become somewhat cavalier about the clothes they had put me in. Oh, I liked them, all the height of fashion whether they were meant for a dinner or a dance or even a brief promenade where I was to be seen but not spoken to. I had grown used to the luxury, had come to expect it, but when Mielle carefully removed the stainless cotton cover from the dress I was to wear that night, I gasped.

I must have imagined the breath of sea air that gusted from it when she pulled the cloth cover away entirely. There was no way it would have retained that from its trip across the Atlantic, but still it was the ocean I thought of when it was revealed, the way the moon took on a pure frigid whiteness so far from shore, and the shards of moonlight reflected on the water were sharp enough to cut.

This dress bore no hint of color, not a single shade of rose nor a breath of blue. Certainly there was no cream. Instead it was a white that would stain immediately if you touched it with one wrong fingertip, something that barely seemed able to exist for more than a moment in the real world.

At first glance, it was almost simple, a modern smooth silhouette over the waist and hips, a modest bustle from which descended a long train. It was when you looked closer at the high collar with its narrow, deep neckline and the subtle lines of decoration that adorned the edges of the bodice and even down the sides of the spiral-laced busk that you saw the embroidery, and then you saw that rather than silk thread, it was pearls.

Thousands of pearls no larger than a pinhead had been sewn into intricate patterns adorning the bodice. If I were in any other household, I would have called them ostentatious and clear fakes, paste, wax, and fish scale, but here I knew they were real. They could not be otherwise. The outer skirt was comparatively plain, only an unrelieved field of that astonishing white, and it parted over the more elaborate underskirt, where larger pearls hung in tassels from the decorative band that circled the skirt at my knee.

It was an accomplishment of luxury and nonsense, and I couldn’t help laughing, shaking my head.

“I can’t wear that,” I said, and Mielle blinked politely at me.

“Are you worried about white and virginity right now, of all times?”

“First, bitchy, and I like it on you. Second, no. How the hell are we going to keep that dress in any shape to be seen in the middle of all of that?”

I pointed out the window where the storm raged on, but Mielle only shrugged, unconcerned.

“They are not paying you to figure out the practicalities. You are being paid to—”

“Wear the beautiful dress and the beautiful face, stand, curtsy, make nice, and hold Ginny Marshall’s place, I know.”

“No.”

I jumped as Mielle closed the distance between us without seeming to move. She caught me by the arm with an effortless inhuman strength, looking deep into my eyes.

“These past weeks, you have been paid for your manners and your grace and your ability to follow orders. Tonight, you are being paid to survive. That comes first, as it will come first for the other girls there. If you still do not understand this, you will surely die.” She let me go and stepped back, leaving my bare arm tingling where she had touched me.

“Is it so unlikely I will live as all that?”

“It’s the White Ball,” said Mrs. Howard crisply, entering the room with a stack of velvet boxes in her hands. “It is the first trial. Foolish girls may perish. Girls who are unsuited, girls who are disobedient may fail. My granddaughter surely would not, were she here.”

“But she’s not. I am,” I said, and she flashed me a dark look.

“Did I hire a fool? No? Then be quiet.”

It took Mielle and Mrs. Howard working together to dress me in the presentation gown, and it was an exhausting prospect. Weighed down with pearls and supported with a deeply flounced petticoat, the dress was enormously heavy. Even with the perfect fit that settled the weight on my hips and my shoulders rather than my neck or my back, it was a weight that pressed the heels of my silk shoes into the ground, that made me aware of every step.

I never saw myself wearing this dress with my own face. The moment it was on, I was taken to the vanity where Mielle began the work of applying the false face over mine. She swept a barber’s drape over my shoulders to catch any stray bit of blood despite not having spilled a single drop of it in our long weeks together, and once she was done and applied the hint of rouge and powder, it was Ginny Marshall who sat at the vanity and not me.

Good, let her have all this deadly mess, I thought, but fingering one of the pearl tassels under the drape, I wondered if I would give all this beauty back so quickly.

The woman they brought in for my hair was tongueless from the outset, no need for Mrs. Howard’s work, and she and Mrs. Howard conferred over her small pamphlet of various styles before the elegant fleur-de-lis was agreed upon. Under the barber’s drape, I looked a bit like a severed head on a mound of snow. The hairdresser used her sharp nails to section out my hair before twisting each lock around the heated cylinder of her curler, yanking viciously this way and that until heat and then wax settled my hair the way she wanted it.

It hurt badly enough that tears came to my eyes, and Mielle was quick to dab those away, for fear of ruining her work with the powder. By the end, between the lack of food, the hair wax, and glistening oil for my curls, I felt queerly flammable, more than a little lightheaded. A single careless match would surely set me on fire, and when Mrs. Howard told me to rise and to turn so she could see, I did so with a kind of languid slowness, like the weight of the world was settled on my shoulders and not just a ridiculously heavy dress.

“Yes,” Mrs. Howard said, considering. “It is beautiful. But oh, it should be Iphigenia here.”

I thought of her sitting at the door so late that Mr. Howard had to come collect her for bed. I nearly went to touch her arm as her real granddaughter might have done, but then she straightened.

“Regardless, we shall make do with what we have.”

She turned to go, and it occurred to me that this was how Ginny would have seen her as well, shoulders back and hard as iron. She wouldn’t have suffered Ginny’s touch any more than she suffered mine, and were she here, Ginny would have known better by now.

THERE WAS NO carpet rolled out beyond the door, no awning set up to shelter us from the house to the carriage. A moment into the howling storm, and the fragile beauty that I wore would be destroyed. It would be worse than showing up in a shopgirl’s dress—it would be the ruin of something that had once been beautiful.

We came to the door together, Mrs. Howard, Mr. Howard, and I, none of us in coats or capes, nothing to guard us from the winter storm or cold. Mrs. Howard stopped Mr. Howard to fuss with his tie. He withstood it with good-natured grace, giving it a brief loosening tug when she turned to me. She had hung diamonds around my throat and from my ears, and now she frowned at them, touching an earring and then the central diamond on the necklace, which was the size of a robin’s egg. They were large stones, utterly colorless and cut so well they threw back a thousand dancing points of light. To my eye, they were old-fashioned, and when I had said so, she’d smiled.