Page 13 of The Scarlet Ball

She bridled, because while her kind are used to being thought insincere, they are not often informed of it. Before she could decide on an offended pose to take, righteous anger, contempt, sorrow over my cynicism, I shook my head.

“You can make whatever deal you like with me. You can offer me whatever wealth I can imagine, every single wish that has ever crossed my mind. The only reason you aren’t is because I wouldn’t believe it, and that’s clever of you. Instead, you’re offering me something that I can believe in, but Mrs. Howard, I also believe I understand you.”

“And what in the world does that mean?”

“That I have no guarantees that I’ll walk out of here with a single thing. But I won’t leave with less than I had walking in, and I will tell you that that is little enough.”

“Then you are telling me no.”

“I’m telling you that I need to be convinced saying yes is to my benefit, and so far, you haven’t.”

It was dangerous to set myself up as her equal. There was no moment where she couldn’t ruin my life; I was breaking the rules by first not ignoring that fact, and then refusing to accept it with a smile.

“Very well,” she said, and I tensed because even if I had only got some terrifying memories and a good meal out of this so far, they were still mine.

Rather than sending for someone to hold me down, however, she rose and left the room, saying nothing but throwing a speaking glance over her shoulder. She knew I wasn’t stupid enough to steal something. Her certainty made me want to try it anyway, so I sat with my hands clasped on my lap until she returned with a leather bag. It was marked with the imprimatur of the National City Bank, and inside were a series of blank wax tablets about the size of a dime and only a little thicker.

“Do you know what these are?” she asked, holding one up.

“I wasn’t actually working for drinks and smiles,” I retorted. “Of course I do.”

The world was full of tricks. You could buy a pot of rouge to improve your lip color, and when you wiped it off, you’d find it’d stolen the color you had. You might buy a truth-speaking skull and find that it only spoke truth about carp migrations and cold-water currents. You might follow a recipe to make a mannikin out of clay and hair only to find that your new servant had an urge to see the Caribbean and the will to do so.

The National City Bank, like the Banque de France among others, tried to solve that issue with these little tablets. They conferred ownership until you went to the office itself to break it, and were about as binding as the banks could make them. There were ways around the binding, but not many, and not pleasant ones. Even my death wouldn’t break it easily; she’d suffer to recover her property in the event of my demise—a small consolation to my corpse, but no matter which way I turned it, there was no better deal to be had. I started to ask what kind of collateral could be enough to make a woman like her stay her hand, and then fell silent when she pulled out that red morocco case, stroking it once with her fingertips before setting it down.

“She was sweet,” she said, almost to herself. “She told me before I did it that there were people who had loved this face, and that I should take care of it. This is valuable in more ways than one. I should not like to lose it, and if at the end you will not return it to me, it will be a loss that I cannot smooth over with money or friends. It is not replaceable, and it cannot be returned to me without your consent. Will that suit for your collateral?”

It was more than nothing. At the very least, she would hesitate, and I would have a chance. It’d be space to bargain if I could, run if I had to. I told myself these things while knowing that if Mrs. Howard truly wanted me dead and gone after this, she could do it. I would have to watch around myself at all times and to grab what I could grab when I could grab it. When I ran, because I knew deep down that of course I would have to, I’d have to run fast. I would have to be lucky, and I nearly laughed, because I’d had to be lucky every day of my life.

“All right. All right, give me that face, and I’ll give it back to you safe and sound when I’m in my new house in my new city with all my money.”

It was a simple enough process. I pricked my finger with a sewing needle and drove it several times into the wax, and then she dropped the wax into the clean little pan on her vanity, the kind used to heat kohl or medical pellets over a candle. When the wax was melted, she dribbled half over the face spread out over the vanity’s leather mat and then the rest she used to anoint my forehead.

There was a brief flash of pain, the sensation of something sinking beneath my skin, the taste of wax in the back of my throat, and then it was gone. I blinked, and then tentatively I picked up the face that was in every way that mattered mine.

I held it up at the edges like a handkerchief, and then I looked up at Mrs. Howard.

“Try to take it from me.”

She set her jaw, and I will say this for her, she did not flinch as she took the bottom of the face where I had the top. It was fine when she merely held it, but then when she tugged, she made a brief and uncomfortable sound. She might have let go, but I shook my head.

“Keep going.”

“You’re a beast.”

I was, and I watched unblinking as she pulled harder. The face would not slip from my fingers no matter how lightly I held it, and her knuckles whitened as she obeyed me. As I watched, a red rime appeared around her fingernails where they grasped the skin, and after a moment, two droplets of blood fell to the floor.

“All right,” I said, and she let go with a soft gasp.

Her fingers looked as if they had been stabbed through a dozen times with the same needle I had used. She took a handkerchief from the box on the vanity and wiped up the blood, glaring at me. That had hurt her. Perhaps she would make me pay for it, but it would never erase the fact that it had happened.

“Is that all? Are you satisfied?”

I folded the face into its case, tapping it gently against my palm. The prospect of what I was doing stretched in front of me like a long dark road. There was no way to see the turnings, what eyes watched me from the shadows, what the end might be, if I even made it to the end.

I could see nothing but the choice, yes or no, and one way had beautiful dresses and cherries, and the other was sleeping three to a bed in sodden sheets for fear of fire in the night. I tried to tell myself that I could go back to Mulberry Street, be done with this terrible woman and her husband, with Rabbit Rabbit and girls split open on the floor, but I knew I was only lying to myself. Perhaps I could have turned back yesterday, played stupid when she asked me, tripped and fell when she made me walk, thrown myself out of the carriage and fled into the streets; perhaps by then it had already been too late. Today, I was someone else, or perhaps I was someone I had once been. Perhaps I was just tired of running.

“Yes,” I said. “I am. We have a deal.”