Page 54 of The Scarlet Ball

I must have slept after all, because I started awake when the coachman called to the bays. He pulled them to a stop, and then he came to open the door and let down the step. We climbed out into a night bathed in red, the salt beneath our feet throwing back a stained pinkish glow.

While we traveled, a red moon had risen, so large that it took up a full eighth of the sky. Bright points of light circled it like a series of sparkling diamond bracelets, and it was so much that I covered my eyes, shaking my head. It was too great, it was too strange—It is too old and it knows too much, suggested a voice in my head—and I was not sure that I could bear it.

“Don’t look at it,” Mrs. Howard said. “Look at your feet.”

I forced myself to open my eyes, and I did as she said, studying my slippers, which next to the stark white of the salt were an almost livid pink. I stared at them until I felt steadier.

Then I lifted my head, specifically not looking up at the thing in the sky. I was grimly sure that it was no moon. It was one more predatory thing in a world of them. I could not bear its strangeness, so I would pretend instead that I was someone who could.

“I beg your pardon, Grandmother,” I said in my best Ginny voice. “May we continue?”

We’d come to the gates (only the gates, there was no fence) of a mansion, a building toothed with tall pillars along the front, grown out and sprawling without the restrictions of building in the city. Before it on the split path was a fountain where a nymph stood with a tall wolfhound pressed against her naked thigh, but there could be no water in this place. It was, I thought as we made our way along, like a polite fiction held out to us, a comfort, a mask to hide something that might upset us.

We were greeted by footmen, our coats taken, and directed immediately to the ballroom. It seemed we were late; Mrs. Howard made a small displeased-cat sound, and Mr. Howard, easy as ever, touched her wrist to calm her.

As we entered the ballroom, the cavernous chamber opened up before us, its far edges lost to shadow. I had come to expect no less, and there was an echoing quality to the space that made me think that there was no true roof over it at all; when I looked up, I saw a ceiling flooded with a clean warm glow, just the barest shade of pink beginning to edge across it. It was impossible to tell if it was a dawn sky or a sunset, and the idea of this hall, shrouded in darkness with the lords in attendance, made my stomach twist into a hard knot inside me.

Scattered across the floor were the other girls, none of them talking, all of them sheltering with their families while they could. I counted eleven of us left, including me.

“It is fewer than I would have thought.”

The speaker was Mrs. de Lange, her husband trailing in her wake, and Mrs. Howard dutifully offered her cheek for a kiss.

“There were more our season,” Mrs. Howard responded, “but I suppose it means that the next generation will be stronger.”

Mrs. de Lange had presided over the White Ball. Here, however, she waited with her hands folded in front of her like the other matrons, and it was her husband, calm-eyed Mr. de Lange, who finally clapped his hands.

“Who is willing, to the circle, who is not, to the shadows.”

The matrons and their husbands retreated to the chairs at the edges of the room. I saw Mrs. Gelder, famous for her blue minks and her diamond mine in India, clasp her daughter’s hand hard. The rest turned and walked away with their spines like swords. They would see their girls again, or they would not, and they had made such peace as they could with it.

We girls came to stand in a large circle around Mr. de Lange. He looked us over with a hawk’s surmise, stern as a dance instructor, hunger tightly leashed to show what a good monster he had been for a generation or more. When he spoke, his voice was deceptively gentle.

“Your mothers called us from the dark places, the wild places, and they have fed us so well that there is nothing in the world we want better than to obey their whims. You were raised in our long shadows, and you have seen how quick we are to defend what we are told was ours. Here our protection ends.”

From the darkness, there was a restless rustling, wildfires crackling, floods breaking against the seawalls.

“At the White Ball, you chose to call down the demons. At the Rose Ball, the choice is ours. Be graceful, be lucky, be without fear in the face of the first things that made men afraid, and we will love you. Be otherwise, and be eaten.”

On the last word, he burst into flame, all flesh replaced with fire and a tower of smoke rising to the pale ceiling above. I saw it suddenly, how he and Mr. Howard would both burn you, but where Mr. Howard would turn you to ash inside of a moment, Mr. de Lange would suffocate you, rain dead birds on the ground, drop elk and wolves to their knees in the forest. He could suffocate us all the same way, leave us still warm with no breath in our smoke-blackened lungs, and if he had not been civilized, he would have done.

Then he pulled all of it, flames, heat, and smoke, back into himself, Mr. de Lange again. With a slight smile, he bowed to us and departed to the sides as somewhere in the darkness, someone set their bow to their violin’s strings. The note was long and warbling, shivery in a way that turned your stomach.

A tremor ran around the ring as we joined hands. This was a dance we had never practiced together. Instead, I had learned it with Mielle, Mrs. Howard watching. The others had learned it from their mothers, perhaps with sisters or cousins who stepped in to fill the numbers without knowing what ritual it was they were enacting.

It was simple enough, sixteen counts left, sixteen right, skip-step left, skip-step right, join hands to skip-step into the circle, drop hands to crisscross back, take hands again. It repeated twice more, and then, instead of joining hands, we turned out of the circle to offer our hands to what was out there for a count of four.

The music played, and as we began to circle, it seemed to me that I had stumbled into a hall of mirrors. I saw myself reflected ten times, girls in blush dresses, our hair piled elegantly on our heads, our placid expressions identical. We were all hiding behind our faces, and we all felt the darkness at our backs. We all heard the leathery flap of wings above us, we all heard the subtle roar of some beast calling from a long distance.

Drop hands, crisscross back, that was the first figure.

I suddenly wanted to ask them what brought them here, whether there was not already enough money for a thousand lifetimes in their family’s coffers, whether it was such a bad thing to sit with a cat in your lap and a fan in your hand. What made them as hungry as the demon lords themselves? What possessed them to think that they would be the exceptions, the lucky, the loved?

Drop hands, crisscross back, that was the second figure.

Of course I knew. It was what had brought me here, and it was the prospect of more. It was something I wanted that I didn’t have. It was the chance of doing more than surviving.

You’ll have a house and money after tonight. You’ll be done. That’s all that you need, isn’t it? It’s a damned sight more than you had two months ago. Be content.