Page 24 of The Scarlet Ball

It was a fortune in ruins, and Mielle cut the spiral lacing up the front of the bodice. Scraps of silk fell to the ground, and then the dress came away from me like some loose carapace, striking the floor with the force of a dead body. I sprang away from it with a shudder, giving it a good kick as I went, and Mielle hung it for the moment in the wardrobe before returning to sit me down at the vanity. She had more care when she picked out the stitches that held the white face over mine, even as I fidgeted under every stray touch. When it pulled free, I gasped as if finally, finally, I could draw a real breath.

“It’s better, isn’t it?”

I nodded, and I let her steer me into the steaming bath, let her pour hot water over my back and clean the blood and grit from my knee. When I was clean enough, she drained the water out and poured in more. This time she let me sink down to my chin in the water, and I was nearly asleep before she spoke.

“You were holding this.”

She had in her hands the black velvet box that Mrs. de Lange had given me at the door. I took it indifferently, but I still gasped when I opened it to reveal a diamond bracelet, two rows of gems like teeth gritted together, brilliance so deep I couldn’t stop staring.

“Here, put it on me.”

Mielle obeyed, and we both followed the points of light on the wall as I rotated my wrist this way and that. Briefly, she touched the stones, running her finger along the row, and I observed her small clean fingers with a curious possessiveness, as if they were my own.

“This belongs to you,” she said softly.

“Of course it does. When I leave here, I’ll sell it straightaway to pay for a tub just like this one.”

“You’ve certainly earned it,” she said in her toneless way, and she paused, so obviously that I tilted my head to one side.

“What is it?”

“What was it like?”

It stuck in my chest, the darkness, the lords, the foot tripping me, the hand that clasped mine. It was too much all at once. I might have cried or screamed, and instead I thought about that moment when the new lord had arrived, when the whole of that place had gone still and no one knew what came next. For a single moment, we were all alike in wonder, and I released a slow breath.

“It was like a lightning strike,” I told her.

Seven

There was a peculiar kind of silence after the White Ball. True winter had set in, drying the air to a crisp, lashing uncovered skin with cold the moment you stepped out of doors. It was the world holding its breath in advance of the real onslaught, and I imagined the other girls were licking their wounds just as I was.

For all the terror, I was not badly hurt. If my ankle was bound up very tight, I could walk, but Mrs. Howard ordered me to stay in bed for three days, fearing the damage it might do to my dancing if I developed a hitch in my step or a limp. Worse was the wound on my knee where I’d struck the floor. It scabbed over fast under Mielle’s careful washing, but it ached like it would never stop.

There were charms to speed the healing, some expensive ones that could have me dancing again within the hour, but these Mrs. Howard withheld.

“You’ll heal it better and more certainly on your own,” she said when I demanded something that would at least help me hobble to the bathroom without assistance. “You know Henry and I sent a great deal of money to help with the flood at Johnstown. Charms and spells are all very well until you are put to the true test.”

The Johnstown flood had just happened in 1889, the South Fork Dam bursting to send billions of gallons of water downstream. In the end, the disaster had claimed two thousand lives, and there were still bodies being discovered up and down the length of the Little Conemaugh River.

It was a failure on many levels, of communication, of engineering, but Mrs. Howard was referring to the deal made with Walter Edgars, the earthquake father of Pearl Edgars who had danced at the White Ball. For more than a decade, he’d shored up the banks to keep the waters back, and then there’d been some trouble. Edgars was slighted, dismissed, and when the time came the banks had crumbled like old plaster. Maybe they would have been built better without a demon lord’s promise, maybe not, but it was a good reminder that magic and charms—like the lords—served until they didn’t.

They brought me the newspapers in bed and, bored after the first day, I read through the columns on my own, checking for names I recognized. Claire Hambly had been unfortunately struck down by illness and removed immediately to a convalescent home in Maryland. At the same time a “ravishing dark-haired beauty ran raving down Hood Street, shouting about demons with all her breath.” I thought of Claire’s splendid dark hair, and I wondered what she had seen in that dark space before we emerged at last. The thought came that she might never really emerge, and I had to stare at the ceiling until I was steadier.

About that time, Mielle told me of a girl who had come to the servants’ entrance looking for me, bronze hair pinned under a nice hat, blue coat with metal acorn buttons.

“That would be Katie McMahon, who worked with me at Madame Valois’s shop. We started at the same time, and she was always worried over me.”

Mielle gave me a quick puzzled look, and I laughed.

“I was in a bad way when I came to this country, let me tell you. I was sick getting off the ship, I was burning through the money I had with me like firewood, and my skills with a needle were my last hope of not ending up on the streets. My other skills, well, I wasn’t in much of a mood to employ them.”

Too scared of being noticed, more like, both by men I’d known and the police in a city I didn’t know, but Mielle didn’t need to know that. I had actually spent a night or two in the basements the police were mandated to keep for the indigent poor. I hadn’t slept at all, and I walked out with fleas in my clothes. Even in the soft bed at Howard House, I got a phantom itch when I thought of them.

“Katie likes to help people where she can, and she helped me get the job with Madame Valois.”

“Would you like to send for her?”

I almost said yes. Even if I wasn’t wearing the right face, there could be a few moments, an order for a hat perhaps, or some chapeau that needed a bit of feather secured. It would be good to see her, perhaps even give her a fat tip of the kind that meant nothing to the Howards but everything to the people who served them.