Page 61 of The Scarlet Ball

“I want you to let Mielle go,” I said. “I want her clear of this. Whatever bonds you have on her, I want you to let her go.”

“Do it yourself. When you are married, I will give Mielle’s indenture to you as a wedding gift. It is common enough. By then, you might see how useful she is. Her kind is difficult to do without when you are accustomed to them.”

“I’m not waiting.”

“You left me in a hell where nothing lives.”

Her words came out like the crack of a whip, so sharp that I recoiled. She waited until the red blotches had gone down from her cheeks before she spoke again.

“Suffer this a little longer,” she said finally. “Do as I say, get yourself a good match and a good marriage, and you will rule as Iphigenia Rowe.”

Fourteen

My change in status meant that Mrs. Howard allowed me to move more freely. This suited me well, as I have never been someone much troubled by the need to ask for permission, but it did not stop her from making her opinions known.

“Surely you have better things to do than to fawn over these new New Yorkers,” she commented one day as I was on my way out for a late lunch with the Beasley sisters. They had nothing to do with the demon lords; they were the daughters of a man who had made a fortune with the invention of a new kind of chicken coop, and I was intrigued by how fresh-faced they were, innocent to the point of foolishness. They for their part were thrilled to be seen with me, which only added to Mrs. Howard’s disapproval.

“Why must you be so much in public with such people? The acquaintance hardly benefits you, and I cannot see why you would find them entertaining. They’re so eager to seem clever that they have made themselves quite dull over it.”

“They invited me,” I said. “One rather does like to be invited. I shouldn’t go over to the Rowes’ every day to let Sebastian eye me up like a lamb chop instead, should I?”

I kept my distance from Sebastian. We saw each other briefly at dinners and salons, once at the opera. He approached, greeting the Howards first, and I gave him my hand with my eyes lowered. We did an excellent imitation of real people, and I was allowed to put him off a little longer. I had thought I knew what he was capable of after the Snowflake Festival, but I learned the truth of it at the Rose Ball. Watching him spiral into the sky in incandescent, ravenous fury, I had realized how little I had understood of him before, and it made me uncharacteristically cautious. Most days, he sent flowers and letters and cards, gifts of bracelets and rings, once even a tiara that was shockingly heavy on my head. This time, I permitted myself to keep them, but I did not wear them, and I had not been alone with him again.

I got some skeptical looks for it, a few sideways comments, and I passed them off with the scorn they deserved, but I knew that something had changed inside me. You don’t trust the second time the same as you do the first; you know too much for that. The thrill of the ice palace was still there, would never quite disappear, but along with it, I saw that hunger turned toward me. I thought of Mrs. Lloyd, who had tried to depart for her home upstate only to find her horses dead in their stalls and her coachman struck blind. I thought of Mrs. Howard, half her hand gone. There was a price for the power, and it made me pull back. At the very least, I needed time to decide what I would do next, and until I figured it out, Sebastian could wait.

“You are relying too much on his fondness for you,” Mrs. Howard said grimly. “You do not understand that the key is to keep his wanting in the right measure, neither too much nor too little. This won’t serve any more than whatever you two got up to during the Snowflake Festival.”

She tapped the fingers of her left hand on her writing desk. Soon after we had come to terms, a Black Dutchwoman who had worked in Delft appeared, took many measurements, and returned three days later with a set of ceramic finger bones in blue and white. These she patiently wired together, and at the end, enchanted with some of Mrs. Howard’s blood and hair to attach the assembly to her wrist. It was quick and lovely—she would likely wish for something more discreet come spring, but with everyone wearing gloves at the moment, she pronounced herself satisfied.

“I know what I’m doing,” I told her confidently, and I went out.

The Beasley girls proved to be every bit as dull as Mrs. Howard had complained they were, as was Adelaide van Horne, who I kept meeting everywhere and never remembering, as was Viola Clifton, who had been turned down at the Rose Ball. She was not overly heartbroken by her disqualification, but she was discontented with her current class of suitor. One of the oldest girls to attend the White Ball, she was not particularly attractive to look at, and her family’s fortunes had taken an unfortunate turn in the last generation. A demon husband would have improved them nicely; without one, all she had to recommend her was her blood and breeding, and she was left looking at a series of widowers and old bachelors.

“I haven’t a one younger than forty,” she said. “I never know what to say to them.”

“Darling, they are not after your conversation,” I told her, stirring the sugar into my tea. “Best you know that right away. The second thing you need to know is whether their money is the kind that will last, and not tied up in a first wife or her child. If you can’t trust your parents to make the right inquiries, then you should do so on your own.”

She looked at me as if I had suggested she measure the men by a hand down their trousers, and I couldn’t even blame her for it. At least in the brothels they told us what we were selling and who we were going to attract. The upper classes of society seemed to relish the prospect of young girls being sent to the places where wolves lived without ever being told that wolves lived there.

Of the other girls who had been chosen at the Rose Ball, I heard little and saw even less. I assumed that Hugette Keynes and Martha Webster were wrapped up with their own demon lords, learning their care and feeding. Mrs. Howard reported back that they had both won fires, though neither, of course, so large or powerful as Mr. Howard himself. Eliza Gelder, who had been matched with a flood, was rumored to be doing very well with her temperamental suitor, letting him place her bets on the horse races at Coney Island. She’d won a fortune so far, and it looked like her luck was holding. Tilly Manchester was a disaster of course—they weren’t even sure what she had attracted at first. He turned out to be a sinkhole, only the second ever recorded, and Mrs. Howard spent a few days making entries in her grimoire, trading notes with the women she most trusted. From the original twenty, five of us had come out of the Rose Ball engaged, or the demonic equivalent. It seemed a dismal graduation class to me, but Mrs. Howard pronounced it a fair showing.

Of the rest a few had gone to Europe, to try their luck with the Iron Court there, and one or two had retreated to their families’ country estates to lick their wounds. The rest had simply stayed in New York, continuing their season and pretending they had never danced with demon lords. I had scoffed at the idea of that being a disappointment when I first heard of it (was it so great a sacrifice to be a rich woman in a rich city?) but now I thought I understood a bit better. They were barred from their mothers’ society. Girls like Viola Clifton would never command a fire or a storm, and I pitied them.

Odile Dryden was one of that last group, a demure star in the season’s night sky, a modest success with prospects including a minor Austrian aristocrat and a young man whose father owned a few railroads. Some old man had had her painted for his collection of miniatures, and no matter what else became of her, there would always be a five-inch-high version of her in a brass locket frame, a tiny bit of her youth squirreled away for the decades to come. Her family was disappointed, but that seemed to be a familiar condition to Odile.

We’d had little to do with one another before, but now she began courting me in earnest: invitations to the theater, to dine at her home, for lunch at Marrakech or Delmonico’s. I might still have ignored her, except for Mrs. Howard’s insistence otherwise.

“You must begin thinking of the future,” she said, “and the Drydens are far from the worst allies you could have. They are related to me on my mother’s side, and Odile’s daughters may grow up with yours to dance the balls in their turn. She wouldn’t be such a bad friend.”

“She’s certainly not a rival,” I said. “But very well.”

Mielle dressed me in a rich damson wool dress, plain except for wickedly precise knife pleats at the cuffs and over my sides. She had been dressing me sharply since the Rose Ball, as if she wished me armored, and I tugged at the lowermost button on the bodice, ivory dyed to match the wool.

“What are you telling me these days?” I asked, half joking.

There’d been a new constraint between us. It was as if she had run out of words for me, and I didn’t know how to draw them from her again.

“Nothing you’d listen to,” she replied blandly. “If you don’t need anything else, some of us have real work to do.”