Page 17 of The Scarlet Ball

“You’re Iphigenia Marshall,” she continued. “You’re the daughter of John and Scylla Marshall, granddaughter of Henry and Atalanta Howard. We shared a dance tutor for two years. Do I know you?”

“Not Iphigenia, Ginny,” I murmured. “And once when we partnered up to learn the Circassian Circle, you stepped on my foot so hard I cried, and you laughed at me.”

“Oh, I’m cruel,” she said with some delight, and so what if she had been sweet? Being cruel would serve her better.

“Sometimes. But you apologized, and we made up afterward.”

Abruptly, she seized my arm, and I stifled a gasp. Her nails were sharp even through my sleeve, and her smile, never changing, had some teeth behind it.

“Tell me more,” she said hungrily, and this was why no one else had. It’d be a match thrown down a mine shaft, with no telling what might ignite.

As if sensing my reticence, her grip tightened, and she stepped closer. She could bite me now if she wished, and it would only look as if she were whispering in my ear.

“Tell me.”

“You know I don’t like to be grabbed,” I murmured in response. “You know that if you do it again, I’ll make you sorry.”

It was enough to make her let go, and there was a petulant edge to her smile now.

“Then what am I meant to do?” She sounded almost normal, but I wasn’t going to trust it again.

“You must let me send you the recipe for a tonic that will help you,” I said, imitating all the concerned society ladies I’d heard clucking over each other’s ills. “My grandmother swears by it.”

I had no idea what preparations Mrs. Howard favored, but at the very least diamorphine and cocaine suspended in wine would do Tilly no harm. Her mother called her, time to talk to the Allens about a shared interest in some soup kitchen off of Anthony Street, and out from under her gaze, I drew a careful, relieved breath.

My performance at the meeting hall was apparently acceptable, for after that Mrs. Howard began taking me about with her on a regular basis. The next day I went with her for tea at Bermondsley with Mrs. Hambly and her daughter Claire, where over a plate of oysters, we commented on the weather, the impossibility of making it across town in any reasonable time any longer, the problem of literacy in the greatest city in the world, and many other fascinating subjects I had cheerfully spent my life unconcerned with up until then. When I looked closely at Claire Hambly I saw that she bore stitches as well, though only along her hairline and not under her chin.

“She’s merely gotten herself some good hair,” Mrs. Howard commented later. “Hindu, unless I miss my guess. That is where all the good hair is coming from lately. I considered replacing yours, but I thought it best to wait for at least a little while.”

I had worried at the beginning that Ginny Marshall’s friends would not recognize her in the face I wore, but then I realized that if she had friends at all, they had changed their faces as well. Nearly every girl improved her features somewhat before the season, and though I doubted that many of them had stolen a face entirely, plenty of them had bought wider eyes, smaller mouths, perhaps just taken the skin off someone from the slums. The girls of this society recognized each other by their guardians and their names announced at the doors, and exquisite manners stood in for any kind of intimacy that they might otherwise have shared.

In the powder room in the home of some railroad baron and his wife, everything was cold marble and chrome rather than gilt. There had been speeches and ginger punch before the dancing had even started, and under Mrs. Howard’s irritated gaze, I excused myself to use the facilities. There were a pair of maids to offer us towels and a trio of silver-framed vanities, elegance itself, but I found a girl bent over one of the basins, coughing something bloody into the porcelain.

“What’s the matter with her?” I asked, and a girl waiting for a seat shook her head philosophically.

“Her voice, poor thing. She went to Kendricks by the look of it. My mother said she didn’t trust him using lark song.”

The thing in the basin, which I could now see was feathered, sent up a sweet weak trill before it was silent, and I winced. As another girl patted the now voiceless one on the back, I took a towel from one of the maids and wrapped up the handful of brittle bones and plucked skin tight before rinsing the rest down the drain.

“Here, see this burned for us,” I said, slipping a tip to the maid, and she complied without expression. It wasn’t like she’d be allowed to remember this afterward.

In many ways, it was very like the life I had left, the one I had run from so fast that I had left my old clothes and my old jewels behind. I had new ones now, and better, but in getting them, I saw the demons everywhere.

Mrs. Howard didn’t bother to warn me. Why should she, when the events we attended required them to look and speak and act like men? They never revealed themselves in any overt fashion, but proximity to Mr. Howard had made me sensitive to the way they moved and that peculiar emptiness in them. At a large party, there would be four or five, sometimes more, and when they stood together, I thought that if you came close, you would hear nothing at all. They mimicked men quite well, but they were nothing of the sort. At the Dearborns’ welcome home for the son who had been on a grand tour, I looked too long at a woman of Mrs. Howard’s age clinging to the arm of an adoring man. The woman was halting in her step, and her husband curtailed his stride to match hers. His gaze on her bent head was worshipful but when someone came too close to his wife, for just an instant, I saw a mouth wider than it ought to be and with too many teeth.

He remembered himself immediately, but he looked troubled, his gaze sweeping the room as if searching for thieves or attackers. When our eyes locked briefly, I had to restrain the urge to take a step back.

I kept one eye out for Mrs. Lloyd after that through the punch and the dancing. Mr. Lloyd was the picture of a doting husband. When Mrs. Lloyd faltered before the end of the evening, she left swooning under her husband’s arm. I heard someone murmuring what a good man she had, how they were the perfect lovematch, nothing like the cold marriages that modern girls contracted, and I thought in a voice much like Mrs. Howard’s, What a fool.

All told, the situation was endurable because it was temporary. I envied these girls their dresses, I envied their food and warmth, but I could well imagine why Ginny had run. Girls like her balanced their wealth and reputation of their families on their heads. They were expected to bite their tongues and swallow the blood, and you saw in their perfected faces how they were prepared to do so all their lives.

At the end of the night, I returned to Mielle, who seated me at the vanity again, picking out the stitches she’d put in earlier that evening and peeling the Howard bastard’s face from mine. I found myself, as this went on, moodily prodding my own face in the mirror, the width of my nose, the fullness of my mouth, and the smoothness of the skin around my eyes.

“I miss my face,” I told her one night. “I miss my own smile and my own eyes. They’re beautiful, no one has anything like them here.”

“So vain,” Mielle said without rancor, and I smiled at her, wide and rude and like myself.

“Of course I’m vain. If I didn’t force myself to be, I’d think that the girls of the Four Hundred were the only beautiful things in the world.”