Page 27 of The Scarlet Ball

When the music ended, we were on the other side of the hall from the Howards, and he bowed before taking my arm.

“Must I take you back to your guardians immediately?”

“And what’s the alternative?”

He nodded toward the refreshment table. “Ginger punch, ginger punch, and more ginger punch. Or I could get you a thimbleful of something stronger, if you’re brave enough for it.”

The challenge was dropped with a clank, and I smiled at him.

“Let me see how quietly you might do it, and perhaps.”

A bell chimed for a brief intermission, which was in his favor, and I watched as he smoothly and discreetly poured a measure from his flask into the glass of punch he brought me. I put it immediately on the tray of a passing waiter, because I wasn’t stupid. The fun came in seeing what he did next, and I was pleased when he only gave me a smile higher on one side than on the other.

“You’re no fun, strawberry,” he said without rancor.

There was a discordant blast of horns and cool air rushed into the ballroom. They had thrown the glass doors lining the side of the room open, and beyond them we could see the Gracens’ statue garden, lit up with lanterns of colored glass. It was a bitterly cold night in New York, but a sparkling silver net had been cast over the top of the garden like a circus tent, and only the mildest cool breeze came through.

“You have perhaps heard of the marble angels captured in Genoa,” Mrs. Gracen said from her place at the head of the hall. “Mr. Gracen and I have purchased three of them to add to our collection. We would be honored to have this esteemed company be the first to see them on full display.”

The crowd turned like cattle, and my hand on my partner’s arm, I went with them. Somewhere in the lot was probably Mrs. Howard, grousing about profligate Italianate styles, but even she couldn’t argue with me following along to see the art.

The Gracens’ statue garden was vast and shadowy, waist-high plinths scattered along the pathless perfect lawn with marble fauns and nymphs and statesmen among them. It was a mad mélange of figures, and in pride of place were three plinths bearing enormous angels atop them, lit with footlights as if they were on a stage. One angel stood proudly with its chin raised in defiance, one knelt weeping, and the third stood in an attitude of prayer, palms together. There’d be hell to pay if the magic that kept them more marble than angel broke, but for the moment, they had to suffer the crowd’s admiration.

Their beauty was hard to look at, but I couldn’t tear my gaze away. My eyes returned over and over again to the defiant one—its anger, how it would kill us all if it could—and I wondered if I could hear a howl from the stone, some sound that granite or shale might hear but flesh could not.

“Miss Marshall.”

I jumped when my dance partner spoke my borrowed name.

“What?” I asked before I remembered young ladies were meant to be more moderate in their response.

“I’ve been here a few times. Do you want to see my favorite?”

“Which one is it?” I asked, and then I laughed when he couldn’t come up with anything immediately. “Show it to me.”

It was not as great a risk as might be supposed. The crowd was threading into the garden, gazing up at the statues in the pools of lantern light. People walked in couples and triplets, heads bent together and pointing out their favorite details. I saw the Wilson sisters on either arm of some cousin of theirs, and I saw as well Martha Webster and Bethany Payne, who I knew from the White Ball, slip behind a plinth holding a lioness and her cubs. Beyond the light, the shadows were deep, almost velvet, and my companion and I sank into them without a sigh as he led me deeper.

He was telling the truth about having been here before, because he settled us behind the most distant plinth from the doors, the courtyard wall just a dozen feet away. Under the stern gaze of some god or general, he touched my cheek, brazen but gentle.

When I didn’t move away, he took a step closer, and in the velvet dark I pulled him down for a kiss. He was good at that too, mindful that my hair couldn’t come down and to not leave any mark on my skin. His hands were warm on either side of my neck, his mouth easy on mine. I was the one who deepened the kiss. I liked the taste of wine on his lips, the slightest invisible rasp of a beard on his cheek. He smelled clean, and when I slid my hands up his sides and back, he was lithe under the wool and cotton.

“God, you’re beautiful,” he whispered against my lips.

The horns sounded again, the resumption of the ball.

“We should go back in,” I said.

“No, stay here with me.” He kissed me again, and I really wished we could continue. I even briefly toyed with the idea of lifting my skirts, seeing if he’d lend me a hand, but there are some sins not even good perfume can cover up, and besides, we were running out of time. I pushed him away, blotting my mouth with my fingertips.

“Come on,” I said, glancing around the edge of the plinth, “we need to get back.”

There were still people in the garden, slow to trail back in, we should be fine, but he tugged me to him again, making me gasp out loud with his mouth at the side of my neck. Christ, but it felt good, it was good, I hadn’t been kissed in so long, and I missed it, I missed him, and I took another minute to be someone who wasn’t Ginny Marshall before shaking him off.

“All right, that’s enough—”

He stopped, and we were balanced in that far too familiar fraught moment when you can see a man deciding if he will accept a refusal. I would never know which way it would have gone because just then, a strange look came over his face. He grimaced and his mouth fell wide open.

“Oh,” he said in surprise, “I’m so sorry about this, I—”