Page 28 of The Scarlet Ball

Red bloomed from the center of his white shirt, not as if he had been stabbed from behind but as if he had simply split. A rent had opened behind his clothing, almost accidentally, and now the blood was coming out. He was dead standing up, the blood a symptom of something much worse going wrong inside him, and he began to topple forward.

I should have been screaming, but something trapped the scream in my throat. I wanted to blame the Howards and their glittering, brutal society, but it might have come from my time in the brothels. It might have come from my years at the convent. Wherever it came from, it said, Do not make a sound, or you will be next.

Instinctively I reached forward to catch him as he fell, but before I could, before a single drop of blood could strike my gloves or my skirt, something dark rose up behind him, black against the gentler black of the garden’s shadows. It was formless, eyeless, mouthless, expressionless except that the sense of hunger and avarice that rolled off it was as suffocating as a wool blanket, soaked in wine and thrown over my head.

He dropped to the ground, and I stepped back, one foot and then another like it was a dance that Mielle was teaching me. I went slow, and then I went fast, and when it seemed to me that the statues of that place turned their heads to see what was the matter, I turned and ran.

Behind me there was a rending sound, something wet hitting the grass, something groaning in pleasure, and I ran faster. I would have burst into the ballroom just like that if someone hadn’t caught me in her arms, halting my flight with a bone-jarring strength.

“I say, Ginny, I should have thought you had more sense than to go off with Sebastian Rowe.”

His name was Sebastian, I thought with barely controlled hysteria. I looked up to see it was Martha Webster who had grabbed me. She was built like an oak tree, the biggest girl I had seen at the White Ball, and they must have had shipwrights build her corset because it held her in and up like armor. I’d not shaken her a bit when I crashed into her, and now she held me up on my feet as if I were a doll.

“Here, get your breath. Are you hurt?”

I shook my head, and she laughed at the offended expression on my face.

“Then let’s go back in.”

Arm in arm we stepped under the bright lights of the ballroom, away from that place of shadows. Martha walked me all the way to the Howards, telling them we’d gotten distracted by some octopus-headed nymph in the garden, before she disappeared to find her own parents.

I didn’t know how badly off I was until Mrs. Howard took a second look at my face, her eyebrows drawing together in consternation.

“What happened to you?”

I tried to answer her, but someone had swapped out my voice for a stone. It sat in my throat, seemed to grow larger when I noticed it. When I tried to speak around it anyway, I gagged, and Mrs. Howard linked arms with me, as if I were supporting her.

“We’ll only be a moment,” she said to Mr. Howard, who looked preoccupied. When I glanced over my shoulder as Mrs. Howard escorted me out of the ballroom, he was surveying the crowd, a faintly puzzled expression on his face.

With an unerring sense of direction, Mrs. Howard directed me to a small gallery off the receiving hall, a tall chamber with paintings hung nearly edge to edge to the ceiling. There was a faint horror to me in that all of the figures in the paintings had blindfolds painted over their eyes, and Mrs. Howard snorted.

“Old Virgil grew tired of them carrying tales back to his mother, so he banished them here. Don’t look at them, look at me.”

I did as she said, unable to keep my teeth from chattering. My eyes burned, but if I closed them I would surely see that gout of red, that body falling again, I would see it, I would hear it, I would never stop, and—

Mrs. Howard made a displeased sound, and she dug into her reticule, coming up with the most lovely silver flask.

“Here, take a sip of this. Only a sip, mind you.”

The memory of Sebastian Rowe doing something similar less than an hour ago made me hurry to do her bidding. Whatever was in her flask would be better than this. I took a sip, and then I had to press my hand hard against my breastbone to keep from choking.

I’d had sherry from Málaga and whisky from Scotland. I’d drunk Chinese wine with a snake drowned in the bottle and English gin with a mummified human finger crumbled into it. I drank less than anyone guessed, but every girl in Paris knows how. I had never had anything like this before, and Mrs. Howard put her hand over mine to keep me from drinking again.

It was something like plum and something like fig, but underlying all of it was smoke and heat. It dropped straight to the pit of my belly, warming me to the skin as it went, and I covered my mouth as if I was afraid of what might come out.

“Breathe through your nose. Stand up straight, don’t look at the faces on the wall.”

I obeyed, and slowly my heart slowed its mad gallop. Whatever I drank had given me some weight—I no longer felt as if I was going to go flying off into the sky. I could shepherd my thoughts away from what had happened in the garden, leave it for later. When I looked around the room, the enormous ferns in their stands, the banked hearth that wanted a good raking, the pattern woven into the rug, they had gone velvety at the edges and could never hurt me.

“All right. Look at me.”

I found myself at once fascinated by her face. I had thought her all harsh and cutting angles, nothing but ice fields and saw blades, but now I realized how soft she was as well. She was like the convent garden in late spring, the soil turned so that anything might be buried within it. What you buried in the garden would become food sooner or later, no matter how nasty or dark or—

She smacked my hand down, and I realized I had reached up to touch her cheek.

“Can you stand another dance?”

I shook my head, and she uttered an aggrieved sigh.